Over the past week or so, we’ve encountered several sites that offer file-sharing services via Twitter. Though some of our commenters are dubious about the userfulness, legality, and peer-to-peer nature of the services, we generally like the idea of using Twitter to send documents, presentations, and…
Oh, let’s be honest. Each for our own reasons, we want to send one another songs online, usually as illegally downloaded and shared MP3s; and Twitter seems like a more interesting way of doing that than email. We’ve discovered a new site that lets us send songs as MP3s on our hard drives, as MP3s hosted on a website, or even as YouTube videos or imeem audio clips plucked from the app’s library. Ladies and gentlemen, we give you SongTwit!
The site, which is still in its infancy, gives users a three-step process for sending music via Twitter. First, the user finds the song. As aforementioned, the song could be on a website, on a user’s hard drive, or in the SongTwit library, which seems to consist of third party-hosted audio clips (this seems fine for web-based sharing, but we wonder how well it will work for various mobile devices):
If the user is working from the SongTwit library, he is presented with a range of selections and is able to preview the song/video before it goes out as a tweet:
The user then provides his Twitter username and password and a message of 115 characters or fewer. The tweet is sent (publicly or as a reply; the creators are still working on DMs); and the world rejoices.
When other users click the SongTwit link, they are redirected to a SongTwit page with a little custom player (video for YouTube clips is minimized) and the original sender’s message:
There are a few flaws of the service, aside from the DM-less-ness. No downloads from these pages are yet available, and they’re still working on the broken pause button on the media players.
Still, the search function really does help save time that would likely have been spent trolling YouTube for clips of that one Venga Boys song from 1999. And that’s what the Internet is for, no?
We’d love to see musicians using Twitter more for blatant self-promotion, and this would be an excellent way to send fans demos or previews of new songs. The download function would be an excellent addition to the service for this use case alone. Then again, without the download function, that’s one more piece of content the musician doesn’t have to completely give away for nothing while not denying the fans who really just want to listen.
