Share Streaming MP3s at FriendFeed and Swurl

Yesterday I wrote about Swurl but today found a great new feature I hadn’t seen during my original testing of the service. I had added my Last.fm account but it hadn’t imported my “loved” tracks yet. Today when I revisited I was very surprised to find what it does when importing your tracks.

Here’s an example from Marshall Kirkpatrick‘s page on Swurl

There are several cool features that supplement imported tracks. There is a play button that will stream the song, if you mouseover you will see the cover of the cd, there will be a download link for the track, and finally you are presented with lyrics for the track. Some of the features will not always work for tracks as they are apparently running track data through a variety of services to achieve this which aren’t always available.

FriendFeed has also recently added the ability to stream enclosures on the site in a flash player. Yesterday I started coming across some feed items from user edythe labeled “Last Loved MP3’s” that included the inline player. I was curious and wanted to know how she was doing this. It turns out she was using this yahoo pipe which converts the Last.fm recently loved tracks XML feed to a RSS feed including links to MP3’s from Seeqpod.

If you want to do the same:

1. Enter your Last.fm user id on the Yahoo Pipe page
2. click “Run Pipe”
3. Click on the RSS icon titled “More options”
4. Click on “Get as RSS”
5. Now copy the url in your browser to your buffer
6. Go to FriendFeed and click on the “Me” tab
7. Click on the “Edit/add” link under Services
8. Click on “Blog” under Blogging
9. Paste the url from your buffer and click on the “Import Blog” button

Now just go start loving tracks on Last.fm and watch as they start to appear in your feed. Keep in mind that this feed is just including links for tracks if they are available on Seeqpod and in many cases they won’t work properly. Nevertheless it’s a pretty cool little hack to share your loved songs on FriendFeed.

These are some really cool features that are taking the Lifestreaming experience to the next level by by offering immediate exposure for discovering new music your friends listen to.  It’s great seeing new innovation in the space by leveraging additional services and functionality and I look forward to watching this logic applied in other areas.