My Letter to the Economist

Twisten: Listen to Twitter

Dan Rua
Florida Venture Blog

February 04, 2009

Did you know you can listen to Twitter? Yes, listen -- or better yet, twisten. Thanks to yet another innovation from the script kiddies over at free music [ http://grooveshark.com/ ] monster Grooveshark [ http://www.floridaventureblog.com/2007/10/grooveshark-is-legal-napsitunefacepedia.html ], you now can. The idea reminds me of Coke's old commercial "teach the world to sing in perfect harmony," with Twitter as the grand stage.

All the songs good enough to tweet

Twisten.fm allows you to easily share songs and constantly scans the twitter stream, looking for songs people have shared via tinysong or other tweet tools -- those song-sharing tweets are counted as "twistens". Those twistens are then listed at twisten.fm, organized as tweets by yourself [ http://twisten.fm/user/danrua ], friends or everyone. As usual for anything Grooveshark, the site has a nice, clean design.

Play on-the-fly

However, twisten.fm isn't just a list of songs you should go find. You can actually click a PLAY arrow on every twisten to listen on-the-fly. You can also click the tinysong [ http://www.floridaventureblog.com/2008/06/tinysong-simple-functional-and-social.html ] link, to play it via listen.grooveshark.com [ http://listen.grooveshark.com/ ]. That's what I do when I find something I like, because I can then click "Autoplay" to get an ongoing stream of similar music.

Additions I'd like

The service has barely even launched, but I've already got requests that I either missed or I'd like to see added. First, I'd like to see some popular lists, built from twisten votes. Similarly, I think a leaderboard of twisteners could encourage sharing and explode Grooveshark's growth. I'd also like Autoplay built-in to twisten.fm so I could listen to a continuous stream of shared songs, maybe prioritized by twisten votes.

Even without these additions, twisten.fm is a compelling, new service creating value from the intersection of Twitter and Grooveshark. Twisten should accelerate Grooveshark's already impressive growth, but could be a powerful service in it's own right: twitter, for music. Great work, G-crew!

Oh, and when you share your first twisten, don't forget to thank @danrua [ http://twitter.com/danrua ] for the heads-up ;-)

Oh, oh...and here's that Coke commercial, just in case I lost you from the start...