A while back I decided to give up on CDs and dive into online music by buying a monthly subscription to Spotify. If you haven’t heard of it, it’s well worth checking out; you can stream whatever music you like, as often as you like for about €10 per month. The subscription is one of those things I see on my bank statement and still think, “it’s well worth it”, which I reckon is a good measure of value.

Spotify Playlists

One of the nice features is the ability to create and share playlists – it’s a great way of discovering new music. However, Spotify don’t (as far as I know) give subscribers a place to share their playlists. I’ve started using a Twitter search to find playlists, and it’s working great – because so many people tweet their playlists you’re never stuck for some good music to listen to. It’s how I’ve been starting my work day for the last couple of weeks: open spotify, search on Twitter for a new playlist to kick things off , start work…

Discovering Playlists via Twitter

To make the whole thing easier, I’ve done a little Twitter search app to look for Spotify listings (you can find it at spoteye.ambientage.com. If you check that out, you’ll get 100 playlists that people have shared through Twitter to keep you entertained. It’s storing playlists for about 10 minutes, so there is usually a good turnover of new music.

More features….maybe

This was a short project that solved one small problem for me (finding playlists), so there is some room for improvement. At the moment it’s displaying only the first 100 play-lists found.  I have a version running that loads more automatically from a database. It also collects the hash  tags people use to describe their playlists too – they could be published to give a way of narrowing down the playlists.

Building Small

Building this was a one day project that was part experimentation, but mainly just solving a small problem for myself.

Taking on small projects like that are a great way of learning things that may not come up in a paid project. In a way it goes against the fundamental idea of business (creating a product or service with a business model capable of generating revenue), but sometimes value can come in other ways. The experience of creating something new can sometimes be just as valuable. I’ve done a few small Twitter search applications, and the access Twitter give to huge amounts of real-time, user-generated content can lead to really useful things (this may or may-not be be one of them!).

I also want to credit longUrlPlease for providing a great service that expands the many shortened urls found on Twitter. Without it I would have been wary of publishing lots of shortened links without any way for the user to see where they went. I came across longUrlPlease when reviewing the applicants for Outvesting (I didn’t give them any of my points, but I wish I had now. Sorry guys!).

As always, any feedback & ideas for improvement would be great – leave a comment here or through the app’s form, or get me on Twitter @davkell