Social Whirl Part I: Spotify

There seem to have been some interesting developments over the past few weeks.

We wrote about new social music discovery service mflow when it was in beta-testing phase in back in March, and the human element it incorporates into digital music discovery to challenge the "if you like this, you might like…" suggestions of last.fm, amazon and even iTunes Genius.

In the time since then, Spotify and Mflow have both released updates introducing new features enhancing the social elements of their services - so here are some quick highlights (Spotify here, Mflow in a second post):

SPOTIFY:

An update was released at the end of April with details on their blog, effectively integrating the service with facebook so you can pull in the profiles and send/receive music recommendations to/of your facebook friends who enable the connection.

Cool features:

- Your facebook friends can see your playlists and 'subscribe' to them within the spotify desktop app, each playlist shows a subscriber count and you can see who has subscribed
- You don't have to share EVERY playlist. If you don't want people to see your Best of Britney Spears compilation, you can hide it.
- If you know someone's Spotify username, you can add them by typing it into the search field once you've published your own profile
- You can recommend tracks to your friends by dragging them to their name in the new People sidebar, and any tracks sent to you appear in the nifty new 'inbox' folder.
- Collaborative playlists now show who added a track and when.

On top of the social features, Spotify seem to be positioning themselves as a social-media-integrated-digital-music-management-music-discovery-platform - you can now integrate your own music library with the Spotify library and build combined playlists, filling in gaps, which play through Spotify.

If you've been on the lookout for invites but to no avail - since yesterday, there are now a couple of alternative options.

Mflow has taken a bit of a different but similar route...details coming up.

Click HERE to go to the full Blog