Blip.fm + YouTube Video

As you can see from the image above, when you’re listening to or sharing a song, a YouTube video of the song plays in a window to the right of your screen, right above the stats. If the YouTube video is not available, then a related image such as the album cover is displayed instead.

My personal experience is that there are tons of songs that I’ve listened to that I’ve never actually seen the video. This then provides a unique opportunity to combine something you’ve always done (listen  to the song) with something you probably rarely do (watch the video). Now, am not discounting the fact that there’s people who do both on a very regular basis.

Of course if you would rather not have the videos loaded (such as personal preference or lack of bandwidth), you can filter them out in the search results by adding the search modifier ( -video) when you perform a search. The default search as it is now returns all results (video and no video).

My thoughts are Blip.fm adding YouTube videos to its platform is a great addition that will surely add to the total user experience and definitely bring in more users.

Notice the screen shots of both applications below:

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.

I use a free service called Blip.fm. You can sign up for your account here.

Once you’ve signed up, you became a Blip.fm DJ. You can then search for music that you want to listen to. The search results give you an option to either preview a song, or to share it with others by blipping the song. When you blip the song, it is broadcast on every blip.fm user’s public timeline.

Immediately after you blip a song, blip.fm shows you other users that blipped the same song in the event you want to connect with them. You can connect with other users with the same music interests as you when you search by music or if you know their blip.fm username by using the syntax http://blip.fm/username.

When the song you blipped is broadcast on the public timeline, other blip.fm users that like the song may choose to  give you props, which can be considered a thumbs up for a good music selection. They may also choose to become a ‘listener’ to your ‘online radio statio’ by adding you to their favorites. Your listeners automatically receive all your blips in the Home tab. The Profile tab shows blips by you.

With blip.fm you may also choose to re-blip a song, add it to your playlist, bookmark and share it via the Addthis toolbar, buy the MP3 via Amazon or get the ringtone via Thumbplay.

Blip.fm also allows you to embed a song into a website such as the example below (I highly recommend that the site you are posting to allows you to use HTML code).

One thing I like about blip.fm is that it is an online playlist of songs you enjoy listening to, thus the reference to you being the DJ of your own online radio station. One thing I don’t like about blip.fm is that the songs are not hosted on their sites, rather on other sites and servers. This translates into songs being unavailable at times or not appearing on search results at all. A previous BusinessWeek article however indicated that blip.fm was in talks with the four major music labels to have their music hosted on its site.

Here’s another really cool part. Blip.fm also allows you to automatically send those updates to your other social networks, currently Twitter, Friendfeed, Tumblr, Livejournal, Jaiku and Last.fm. One social network tham you may notice missing from this list is Facebook; however if you use Twitter also, you may already know that you can use Twitter to update your Facebook status. In essence, you are updating your Facebook status using Blip.fm via Twitter.