Quick Pitch: Swift.fm is a new, free service that leverages Twitter to let users discover music from folks they're following on Twitter.
Genius Idea: Think of Swift.fm as a friend-powered Pandora. Users can share music tracks with friends by either tweeting in a special format or uploading a track directly through the Swift.fm site. Swift.fm also takes all the songs your friends "swift" and turns it into a custom radio station.
Services like Blip.fm are great on their own, and integrate well into Twitter, but you are often limited by what songs are available on Blip's servers. This is actually a problem for most of the services that offer music sharing via Twitter -- you are limited to what online streaming libraries those tools access.
With Swift.fm, you can not only search Swift for tracks to play and share with friends, you can upload your own MP3s (up to 10MB in size) to share. That's really nice, and it adds a Tumblr-esque simplicity to sharing those obscure tracks that might not exist in iMEEM.
What I like about Swift.fm is how smoothly it integrates into Twitter. You sign in using OAuth, no other account stuff needed, you can tweet from the site or use a special syntax to tweet from your favorite Twitter client. You can also monitor Swift.fm mentions and tag songs as favorites so you can play them back again, as well as retweet songs you like that you see in your Swiftlist (basically a listing of what people you follow are also listening to) or that you find via search.
The service is still in beta and the real Pandora-esque attributes won't really be apparent until more users sign up for the service. Still, even it its early form, I like the direction that Swift.fm is going in and I like its approach to discovering and sharing tracks using Twitter.
Do you share music over Twitter? If so, what service(s) do you use?
Spark of Genius Series Sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark
