I posted about MixApp(a social playlist tool) awhile back. I thought it was pretty slick to be able to add music to a “musical chat room” of sorts, so you could listen and comment in real time with your friends.
Totally neat idea, but also probably limited because of the real-time interaction requirements inherent within the application itself. That is to say that for the tool to be useful, you’ve got to have you and at least one other friend actively adding music to the playlist, all the time. Songs are not saved after they are played and so you quickly see how this can require more attention than a second activity probably should.
exfm does things a bit differently. The plugin, which is available only in Chrome at the moment (see techcrunch for more details here), is clearly built a set of founders who pay attention to how the 13-30 cohert learn about and listen to music. We surf around, clicking on music we discover through the social web, our favorite music blogs, or youtube. We might find a song that we really dig, listen to it for a few days while our browser remains continously open over that time, we then at some point shutdown our browser, and “poof” the song is gone. Shit.
Also, we probably have a number of friends with whom we jive musically and we might LOVE to know what the stuff is that they’ve been finding out there on the interwebs. They share some of the stuff, but not all of it and so you have a good amount of lost search and discovery effort going on here.
exfm brings mp3′s embedded in the sites you visit into a playlist. You can keep all songs in your playlist or select particular songs. The plugin then retains those songs even after you’ve left a given page and/or shutdown your browser. It also intelligently allows you to see the stuff your friends have found, have listened to, and “noted” (which is exfm’s version of an FB “like). This play on social takes the real-time limitations of mixapp and chucks it out the window.
I hope the dev team at exfm is burning the midnight oil, because I can’t wait to get this on my Android. -RC
