Whenever you hear of Blip.fm, you will more than likely hear of Twitter as well. Many a times, Blip.fm been referred to as the Twitter for music. Let’s took a look and see why this might be the case.

Notice the screen shots of both applications below:

copy-of-blipfm1copy-of-twitter21

They remind me of a term I haven’t heard in a while – Graphic User Interface. The two applications have an almost similar graphic user interface meaning the two applications are presented to the user in an almost similar fashion.

Notice any striking similarities? The Public tab on Blip.fm = the Everyone (Public) tab on Twitter, the Home tab on Blip.fm = the Home tab on Twitter, the Profile tab on Blip.fm = the Profile tab on Twitter. Blip.fm updates are in reply to the question “What song do you want to blip?” (formerly “What are you listening to?”) while Twitter updates are in reply to the question “What are you doing?”. Blip.fm has Replies and so does Twitter (although Replies on Twitter Web edition have morphed into Mentions Of). Blip.fm has reblip while Twitter has retweet. Listeners on blip.fm can be compared to Followers on Twitter. Playlists on blip.fm can be compared to Favorites on Twitter. I guess blip.fm beats out Twitter in that you can give Props or thumbs up for a good blip if you wished to but you can’t do that do that for a good tweet.

Those are similarities you can visually notice immediately. To give you an idea of how integrated these two applications are, I calculated how many Twitter updates originated from Blip.fm in the space of one hour: the result was 1721 or roughly 29 tweets a minute. I believe that this figure could have easily gone way past this because some people are more twittaholics than they are blipaholics.

Many trends you see on Blip.fm are hallmarks of Twitter. Think of the @ sign. Nice thing about Blip.fm is, it allows you to broadcast fine tunes while having the ability to annotate that with a message, a thought etc. A really great example of this would be blips from Blip.fm DJ CarolAnnB (also CarolAnnB on Twitter). If you use Twitter regularly, you are likely familiar with the hashtag #followfriday. CarolAnn makes it so much more fun by adding a #twitterexpress component to it i.e. recommending people to follow on Twitter while adding some feel good music from Blip.fm. If that isn’t genius then I don’t know what is. If you’re not tuned into her station on Blip.fm or following her on Twitter I highly recommend you do.

Hashtags i.e. the # sign are not a feature of Blip.fm however but as discussed earlier, a lot of users have accounts on either network which wouldn’t baffle them to see hashtags # in blip annotations. Blip.fm allows you 150 characters as compared to Twitter’s 140 characters. One theory states that the 10 extra characters are for the blip URLs such as http://blip.fm/~3ttoi

As with any social network platform, a few pointers:

When you blip a song, add some annotation to it. Blipping a song without any annotation is link posting a link on Twitter without any insight as to the target of the link. This is especially true if your updates filter into Twitter. Your followers will probably look at a lonely link and wonder “Why do I need to click on this again?” for instance I would annotate some few lyrics so that others may try and recognize the song.

When you hear a song that you want to blip via another Blip.fm DJ, give them the credit by reblipping the original blip. Am not saying that only one person can blip the song. You may be tuned into one of favorite DJs and you hear a song that makes you go “darn, why didn’t I think to blip this track before?” Reblip – shows the other DJ you appreciate them plus they automatically get a prop when you do. I normally add an @ reply in the annotation so that the Blip.fm DJ sees this in their Replies.

With all said, happy blipping and happy tweeting.