I tinker, dabble, mess with, sample and/or examine a lot of social media outlets and apps as well as other software. I have been playing around with SoundTracking for the last few
weeks. It seems like a cool idea (share the soundtrack of your life) and has some reallycool features (Shazam-like song IDing) but I can’t help thinking I already do this with another app, GetGlue. Because I have used both of these outlets I got to thinking how I like features in both but don’t want to post in both. It becomes tedious to flip back and forth between apps just to inform the world about your latest infatuation.
In essence that’s the reason I had stopped using Gowalla. I simply didn’t want to check-in to a single location twice, once with Gowalla and once with Foursquare. At the time Foursquare was the leader in loc-soc (that is location social, I guess it could be pronounced as either locksock or lowksoak) apps so I stuck with it. A few months later Gowalla made an extraordinary move and nabbed Foursquare’s open API (application programming interface) and added it the Gowalla app as well as adding Facebook and tumblr support. I haven’t used foursquare since. The Gowalla app has the better interface and a great feature set butFoursquare still owns the footprint.
Back to SoundTracking and GetGlue and the rest of social media. SoundTracking has a simple interface that is pretty intuitive, GetGlue has the rewards and has the footprint in media check-ins. It wouldmake a lotof sense if these two companies got together and extended the usability of SoundTracking to all of GetGlue’s media options. Throw in the ability to identify a television show, movie, sporting event, audio book by either sound clip or visually, or both and you may end up with a category dominance that would be hard to touch. By the way Shazam has beenfinding its way into TV show identification. The folks over at SciFy encouraged people to use Shazam during a couple of their shows to get access to exclusive content.
There are a ton of social media outlets that could benefit of teaming up ormerging with competitors or tangential services. It may be the way for many of these companies to survive. Imagine taking a service like Discovr and hooking it up with Shazam, Soundhound or Grace Notes, throw in Bandsintown and a music junkie may never close the app. What if Instagram was an integrated service on your phone or worked with otherservices like iPhoneart.com for uploads or partnered with Color to tell you what users are nearby? What if foursquare and/or Gowalla teamed up with meetup.com or any one of the “friend in the vicinity” services? What about partnering stickybits with GoodGuide? The possibilities may not be endless but there certainly a plethora out there.These companies should look around and realize that there are users that are tied into both services, the current global economy isn’t the best and that they could marry the products and come out with a category-killer. If that happens we all win. The user gets the best experience and the companies grow.
Links from this post
- Bandsintown (http://www.bandsintown.com/iphone)
- Color (http://www.color.com/)
- Discovr (http://www.discovrmusic.com/)
- Foursquare (http://foursquare.com)
- GetGlue (http://getglue.com/)
- GoodGuide (http://www.goodguide.com/)
- Gowalla (http://gowalla.com)
- Instagram (http://instagr.am/)
- iPhoneArt.com (http://iphoneart.com)
- Shazam (http://www.shazam.com/)
- Stickybits (http://www.stickybits.com/)
- Soundhound (http://www.soundhound.com/)
- SoundTracking (http://schematiclabs.com/)
