#swarm.fm

Peter Watts, winner of The Echo Nest's Social Music App Challenge and Music Apps Hack Weekend, has been building incredible stuff using The Echo Nest APIs for quite some time. Now, he and Swarm.fm co-founder Andrew Dever have gone pro, so to speak, with the Swarm.fm Spotify app, launched today.

Any of Spotify's 15 million-plus users can install the Swarm.fm app in their desktop clients with a single click from the Spotify App Finder. Once they do, they'll enter a rich musical universe of social music that lets them do things they've never been able to do before, all in the same place: listen to all what all their friends have been listening to on any Facebook-Connected music service, and turn just about anything they see in the app -- tags, friends, artists, years, and more -- into a streaming radio station that understands their musical taste, in addition to being able to play it all on-demand. (More details and a demo video are available here.)

Yes, Swarm.fm analyzes what's in your Spotify playlists, your local music library, your listening history, and your own Facebook music behavior to filter what all of your friends have been listening to so that it makes sense for you, personally. The magic behind this feature is our groundbreaking Taste Profile technology, which builds a unique understanding of anyone's music taste and lets developers apply it to any set of music.

We expect big things from Taste Profiles, and Swarm.fm is one of them. In addition to our Taste Profile API, the new Swarm.fm Spotify app taps into our playlist technology to build a mix around any tag within the app, and our artist data to build the rich artist pages in the app for every artist.

I'm starting this post at 5:59pm EDT (7:59am my time). Which means I made it. A kick-ass music app in 20 days. Here she is: http://bit.ly/qc54Hx

So after racing frantically to finish today, The Echo Nest have announced that they're postponing the deadline for the contest for a month. To be honest, I'm a little disappointed. I was in crazy hackathon mode, locked in my room, writing all sorts of code that should never see the light of day. Now I have time to do things like go outside. And eat.

Wouldn't it be cool if you could share what you were listening to with friends, and they could actually listen to the track without leaving their news feed. Yes, yes it would. And that's what I added today. The player now features more details about the track you're listening to

and if you hit share, you can recommend the track to friends

add a message if you want and the track gets posted to your wall

it is now fully streamable, even for friends without the app

Note that none of this requires you to authenticate an app. This is because I create an Open Graph page for every track and use standard 'Like' buttons for sharing. At the moment these pages look pretty bland

My original plan was to build a music hub (swarm.fm), that turned your Facebook friends and their 'Likes' into a fully streamable music collection. Part of this experience would be a chrome extension, that provided the music playback, and went with you anywhere on the web. That extension, now known as +Music, evolved to become far bigger (and cooler) than I imagined. So with two days left in the race to build a kick-ass music app, do I rush to build swarm.fm with limited features, or do I make +Music the focus and polish it up for submission?

Last night I played around with some of the features for Swarm, and came to the conclusion that two days simply isn't enough. I still plan to build it, no doubt, but for the purpose of this contest, I'm just going to make sure that +Music is rock solid.

Here's what's in the pipeline:

 - Improved Rdio search results  - Scanning large bodies of text (ie the whole page) and mixing the artists found  - Auto complete artist names  - Keyboard shortcuts  - Tidy up presentation / landing pages  - Attribution and click-though to the blogs where MP3s are sourced  - Artist details / links to profiles  - Share / Send tracks from the extension  - Better caching / scale-proofing  - Release in the Chrome Extension Gallery 

As you'll probably agree, there's some important tasks in there! So in mourning the short-term loss of Swarm, we can celebrate that +Music is going to really kick ass.

Also, I took some of the testing I did for Swarm around scanning friends and their likes and build a little demo. It literally dumps everything on one page (friends in blue, bands in red). Obviously you wouldn't do this in a real app (there's over 5000 images on the page!), but it goes to show the depth of music connections available. If only there was a way to listen to all these bands!

I've put out the latest version of +Music for Google Chrome. More details at http://swarm.fm/+music/

I had hoped to release another beta of the extension today, but alas, I was thwarted by various bugs and hurdles. I will say though, it's almost there and looking mighty fine. Here's a look at the new composer, which now let's you post an mp3, rdio stream or youtube video to your Facebook Wall.