MediaMaster’s Facebook App

MediaMaster has just released a new Facebook app that lets you create a playlist and share it with your friends. With the app, you can create a playlist of your favorite songs, in an order you specify, and have it available to any of your profile’s visitors via a miniplayer. Thankfully, unlike MySpace, the songs aren’t playing immediately upon loading your friend’s profile. When you visit someone’s profile who has the MediaMaster app, you have the option to turn on the miniplayer, pause it, or stop it altogether. The miniplayer also has buttons that let your friends play your playlist in
the music player of their choice, whether it’s Winamp, iTunes, or
Windows Media Player. This is handy especially if they want to listen
to your tunes after they leave your profile page. To use the MediaMaster radio in Facebook, you click “Add Tunes” after installing the app, which takes you to MediaMaster’s website. Once there, you can upload and organize your songs into a playlist. When you’re finished, the site should take you back to Facebook.

I had trouble getting the app to work in Firefox, but when I loaded it in IE 7, all was well. I’m curious if others are having the same problem? Uploading songs was a breeze - I was even able to upload music stored on a network location with ease. However, post-upload, I wasn’t automatically redirected back to Facebook as promised, but I managed. Once back in Facebook, I realized that somehow, I ended up with MediaMaster’s sample album of classical music in my radio playlist at first - it wasn’t showing in my playlist, but it started playing when I tested the app on my site. I went back to my MediaMaster radio and deleted the sample album. Better safe than sorry. Don’t want people thinking I’ve been dying to share classical songs with them. I’m old, but I’m not *that* old. Other than these minor glitches, the app was easy enough to use and certainly fun to play with. I’ll have to add some more songs once I can locate some more un-DRM’ed tunes in my collection - a task that is even harder than it sounds.

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Facebook has recently introduced a new feature that allows you to send messages to your friends who have yet to join the rapidly growing, popular social network.  Now when you go to send an email or share an album, your non-Facebook friends can see the content you shared and reply to you without having to sign up for Facebook. Anyone you email will then be added to your "friend selector," so you won’t have to remember their email address in the future. Additionally, if you email someone who is on Facebook, but you used their email address instead of name, Facebook will forward the email to their Facebook inbox. So yes, this now means that you will never have to email anyone ever again from your *normal* email account again, because really, what are you emailing besides stuff you posted on Facebook?

Last week at a major press event, Facebook announced their new developer platform which allows developers deep access to the Facebook API in order to develop Facebook-integrated applications. The new platform is much different than the previous read-only API, creating a system for third party companies to develop services that work within Facebook’s user pages. Currently, the list of companies using the new platform include the following (source, CenterNetworks): Atomic Mobile, Attendio, Amazon, All Widgets llc, Box.net, Bunchball, Picnick, Chumby, Channels.com, Dogster, EF Tours, Ether, Fashion for the People, FeedBurner, Fliptrack, Forbes.com, Ford Models, Glimpse.com, Hot or Not, I Like, Jangl, Lending Club, Localplatform, Microsoft, Mog, Mosoto, Obama for America, Oodle, Pickspal, Platial, Plum, Project Agape, Prosper, Photobucket, Qoop, Radar, Rapleaf, Red Bull, RockYou, Rupture, Scrapblog, Scribd, Sidestep, Slide, Snapvine, Splashcast, Terralever, The Founders Fund, Twitter, Uber, U Playme, Veoh, Viagogo, Virgin Mobile USA, Warner Bros Records, Washington Post, Widgetbox, & Yakpack. The application list can be found at www.facebook.com/apps, which is also where you can add them to your profile.

On Tuesday the Facebook blog announced they were opening their doors to all, in a post titled "Welcome to Facebook, Everyone." Originally just for college students with a .edu email address, Facebook had expanded to allow high schoolers and employees of select companies to join as well. So now that Facebook welcomes all of us where we were previously shut out, the question is "do we care?" Facebook’s original incarnation, a college network was brilliant in its simplicity. If you were in school, you were on Facebook (and MySpace too, of course). The exclusivity was the key - your mom and dad couldn’t join, for example. Why would we want to join now? What does Facebook offer that we can’t get from the myriad of other social networks we’ve joined in the meantime and other, cooler ones that are just launching? No seriously - what? I honestly don’t know.