140Char

The LastFM Love Tweet Twitter mashup was obviously a labour of love for Peter Weitzman, and as he says, it was born out of frustration at seeing other systems auto-generate songs being listened to by other Tweeple.

But I’d recommend not using it for two reasons.

1. Autofeeding any information is annoying. And unless you’re sharing the actual audio of songs you like, it’s pointless - which brings me to 2:

2. Blip.fm.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m a huge fan of last.fm and have a pretty big playlist on there. It’s generally my site of choice for listening to streaming music. But if I want to listen to Tweeple’s music, I head to Blip.fm to get an almost random selection of delights and disasters.

After all, blip.fm is like crowdsourcing John Peel. It’s fun when I’m in the mood, but stumbling across obscure German hardcore trance tends to make me run back to my own selections. And if people start bombarding Twitter with autofeeds, I can’t escape.

It took me a couple of passes to get the value of Blip.fm as opposed to existing streaming radio online like last.fm. At first, for some reason, it wasn’t running properly and playing each track in turn for me, which didn’t help! But now it’s becoming a great way to discover new music recommended by my friends, even if I normally revert to streaming my last.fm library for longer periods. The two compliment each other is the same way as someone like John Peel complimented by record collection, but I couldn’t always make it through an entire show before some obscure German techno forced me to change radio station.

Blip.fm helps me find new music by effectively allowing users to Twitter with each song they choose, giving it some context, or publicly proclaiming their love for it etc. And I can aggregate these choices into my own list, give ‘props’ to other users for good choices, and filter the overall stream via my friends, just as I would with Twitter.

Where it might give a clue to revenue streams for microblogging is in offering the direct link to buy any track as an MP3 via Amazon. So if I like a particular track or artist, the opportunity to make a quick impulse purchase is always there - and it’s backed up by allowing me to listen to the track based on recommendations by my friends.

The only weakness is that not every track is available, and I need to be aware that I want to listen to this track offline, in my car, on an Ipod, at the time that I’m experiencing it…or be able to find it easily, and at the moment there’s no way to search my Playlist, or add individual songs to my Amazon wishlist.

But if what if this model was more widely applied - to offline magazines and books for example. And to products as well? One Twitter Affiliates scheme which wasn’t tied into a sole retailer, but operated as an aggregation service to allow me to recommend almost anything, and offer a direct link?

It’s probably the quickest and simplest method of monetising the Twitterati. And people can be persuaded to link their recommendations to returns for themselves or even for charity, as something like Squidoo shows.

It would be possible to test the theory if individuals listed book recommendations etc via existing Amazon etc affiliate accounts, but this may lead to confusion and disappointment if it isn’t flagged up as such before an unsuspecting user follows the link - but Twitter and the extra 20 characters could flag referral posts quickly and uniformly.

The only question for me is who tries it first - Twitter, or an enterprising external team? Anyone know a good developer?