Every now and then, we come across cool apps that allow geeks to conveniently manage their musical tastes in a way that encourages more real-world fun.
Last year, we met up with Livekick’s founders in New York to talk about their very thorough site for helping web geeks get out to more shows and concerts. Today, we’ve discovered Roadie, a much simpler app that focuses on album releases. Roadie creates an RSS feed or iCal based on a user’s Last.fm favorite acts or a custom list of manually entered bands. Essentially, it allows users to keep up with album releases quickly and painlessly.
The Last.fm import is a super simple way to get users quickly into using the site’s features, but we also wish they’d allow for an iTunes artist scan:
The RSS feed, which we quickly popped into Google Reader, shows recent and upcoming releases:
And iCal was just as easily added to Google Calendar, for those who prefer those kinds of notifications:
Users can upload other folks’ Last.fm faves, as well, if gift-giving ideas are in need. Other features that would make this app even more useful would be a Twitter OAuth to receive DMs the day before or the day of an album’s release. And of course, we’d love to see a location-based feature that added tour dates to the mix.
Roadie comes from Portuguese web and mobile dev shop Think Orange, which was founded by a couple of Ruby on Rails geeks. Roadie is an experimental side project for them, and they’re looking forward to creating many more projects in 2010. We’re looking forward to seeing what they cook up, as well!
Give Roadie a spin, and let us know in the comments what you think. Is this app useful for you?
