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Spotify Takes Its Follow Button Outside Its Walled Garden, Lets Fans Follow Musicians And Others From Anywhere
Following the launch of its Play music-playing button last year, today Spotify took one more step outside of its walled garden: it has launched a new Follow button, a widget that can go on any desktop or mobile page, not just pages within Spotify itself (as the Follow button previously used to work), to let users follow other profiles within Spotify.
By clicking on it, a user can follow others on Spotify — be they artists, other users, music magazines or blogs or labels — and then get updates from them in their Spotify activity streams. Spotify’s Follow button will work much like those from Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and other social networks, and is intended to sit alongside them on websites. That is not an accidental similarity: Spotify’s ambition is to be — as Twitter is for real-time conversation, or Facebook is for more lean-back social interactions, or LinkedIn is for networkers — the default platform for all social music interaction. That’s a position it has already been cultivating with its App Center, its Spotify Social feature, the pre-existing, in-Spotify Follow button, close Facebook integration and more.
The Follow button will serve a few other crucial purposes, too: for those who are not already using Spotify, it will encourage them to download it. For those who are already Spotify users, it will continue to bring the service front and center to their minds, and give them potentially more reasons to return to it. And there is a B2B angle here, too: for the labels, artists and others who appear on Spotify, it places the music streaming service as a more effective marketing platform, highlighting how Spotify may choose to exploit that more commercially in the future.
All of these are essential for Spotify right now, as the company reportedly is working on raising a new round at a $5.3 billion valuation. It is still a loss-making service, so adding more users can help it either beef up numbers for better advertising revenues; or for potentially upselling unpaid users into its paid, premium tiers. Improving relationships with labels and artists by giving them more ways to promote themselves, meanwhile, builds Spotify’s profile as a marketing vehicle (not unlike what Twitter has been doing by building bridges with the broadcast industry).
Spotify tells me that the Follow button will start appearing everywhere beginning today, both on desktop and mobile, just as the Play widget is already.
The Follow button, Spotify notes on its developer pages, comes by way of a piece of code that a developer plugs into a website.
When visitors to that site are logged in to Spotify and click a Follow button, the artist or user is added to the profiles they already follow. If the user does not have a Spotify account, they get prompts to create one. If they do but it’s not launched, they get a prompt to launch it.
For those who are in regions where Spotify is not yet active (it’s currently in 39 countries), users will get a note saying that the service is not yet available in their market.
Spotify has created code for the button to appear with and without profile pictures. Here’s how the enhanced button looks (the pared-down version is illustrated above):
This becomes the second widget that Spotify has created to exist outside of its walled garden, adding to the Play feature that lets users listen to Spotify-based tracks anywhere on the web via an embeddable player. By launching it, it’s taking a step ahead of other rivals like Rdio, which also offers following features but not the ability for them to be added across other sites.
SocialSafe Raises Further $1M, Microsoft ‘Life-Log' Researcher Gordon Bell Becomes Investor And Advisor
SocialSafe, the social media back-up startup co-founded by serial entrepreneur and angel investor Julian Ranger, has added a further $1 million in funding to its coffers, bringing the total raised by the UK company to around $1.855m since it was founded in 2009. In what is being described as a second “interim” round, the additional funding comes from existing backers Marco Sodi and others, along with a number of investors from the UK-based group Knight Ventures.
But, perhaps more interesting is that veteran Microsoft Researcher Gordon Bell also joins as an investor and advisor. Bell is best-known for his pioneering work in ‘Lifelogging‘ — the act of automatically digitising and making searchable all data related to your life — and has co-authored the book “Total Recall” (or ”Your Life Uploaded”) based on his research. And while SocialSafe’s plans are almost certainly nothing quite on the same scale as Bell’s vision, his involvement reaffirms where the startup’s product is heading.
As it stands today, SocialSafe consists of a Mac/Windows app that lets users download and back up their content from various social media accounts, such as Facebook, Google+, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, RSS and Viadeo. Crucially, the resulting archive is then searchable and can be browsed via a handy calendar view. Insights are also provided to surface things like who you most interact with etc.
Backups are stored locally-only, on a user’s own PC, giving a privacy-boost but also leaving it to users to do their own cloud back-up if they choose to. The company has long talked up a future feature that will make it possible to sync the app with popular cloud back-up services, while reminding us that running its own social media back-up service in the cloud would, technically, break many social media services’ Term of Service.
To that end, SocialSafe says it will use the new funding to release a mobile app to bring the service to smartphones and tablets. In addition, it will finally add what it’s calling “Device Independence”, the much talked about “personal Cloud” support, which will enable a user’s SocialSafe library of personal data to be stored on the likes of SkyDrive, Dropbox, Google Drive etc., thus accessible from any device that runs the app. Another planned feature — “Collections” — will allow selective grouping of content across all networks, akin to creating a photo book. Export to PDF is also planned.
Cue a statement from the ‘Lifelogging’ pioneer himself: “Simply being able to backup and search across all your social content at once is incredibly powerful and essential for everything from record keeping to lifelogging,” says Bell, “but when Julian showed me the other features of SocialSafe and told me about his plans for future development, it was clear that SocialSafe had created an essential technology and product roadmap for life logging — and I had to be a part of this just to help move it along faster.”
Can we say Total Social Media Recall?
Finally, I gather that Ranger has been spending quite a bit of time in the U.S. lately, possibly regarding partnerships and a bigger push States-side. Of course, with Backify shuttering its consumer-facing Twitter backup tool, SocialSafe has already positioned itself to benefit. I’m also hearing that Backify will end of life its consumer Facebook option as early as today, giving SocialSafe another opportunity to pick up some of the slack.
Google On The Right Track To Settle Antitrust Concerns In Europe, Says Commissioner
It looks like a settlement is looming in a near-three year long European Union antitrust investigation into Google’s search practices. Speaking at a European Parliament event this morning, EU Competition Commissioner Joaquin Almunia said Google has improved its proposals to allay antitrust concerns, including complaints that it presents biased search results which favour its own vertical services over rivals.
“With the significant improvements on the table, I think we have the possibility to work again and seek to find an effective solution based on a decision under Article 9 of the Antitrust Regulation,” he said today, adding: “We have reached a key moment in this case.”
Other aspects of the EU antitrust prove have focused on whether Google has been copying rivals’ content, such as reviews, and incorporating it into its own offerings. And, on the advertising side, whether it is shutting out competing providers and making it too hard for advertisers to port their campaigns to other services.
On the vertical search concern, Almunia said today that Google has made “significant improvements”, noting that rivals’ links are now “significantly more visible” and have “a larger space of the Google search result page… dedicated to them”. He also flagged up that there is space for rivals to display their logo next to the link, and “a dynamic text associated to each rival link to better inform the user of its content”.
Google’s competitors had also complained about the auction mechanism used to determine which of their links were displayed in its search results. Changes to that mechanism are included in Google’s latest proposals to the Commission.
“The new proposal foresees an auction mechanism which includes the option to bid for each specific query,” noted Almunia. “This is important to also ensure that smaller specialized search operators can be displayed.”
On the complaint about appropriating others’ content, Almunia said Google has “improved the granularity of the opt-out that is offered to third party web sites”. There are also tighter measures to ensure Google cannot “retaliate” against websites that make use of the opt-out, he added.
Google has also committed to no longer include in agreements with publishers “any provisions or impose any unwritten obligations” that would require publishers to source their requirements for online search advertisements exclusively from Google in relation to queries from users in the European region. “The new proposal improves the safeguards against possible circumventions,” said Almunia.
Regarding the advertising complaint, Almunia said Google has offered to “cease to impose any written or unwritten obligations that will prevent advertisers from porting and managing search advertising campaigns across Google’s services and competing services”. He added that this new proposal also provides “stronger guarantees against circumvention”.
Almunia also flagged up as a key commitment that Google has agreed to an “independent monitoring trustee” assisting the EC in determining that the principles outlined in its proposals are being implemented.
In terms of next steps, Almunia said the Commission will work with Google on the wording of the proposed commitment text in the coming weeks, adding that he has asked Google to provide data that shows the impact of the new proposals. The EC will also send out requests for information to industry players to get feedback on the draft proposals. This informal consultation process will take the place of another formal “market test”, according to the FT.
“We know the general positions of the complainants and other stakeholders. What we need now is to receive concrete technical elements on the effectiveness of the proposed package in order to conclude whether this new proposal is satisfactory from a competition point of view,” Almunia added.
“If our investigation on this improved proposal is satisfactory, I will continue the Commitments route and end up with a formal decision next Spring. Otherwise, I will be forced to turn to a procedure under Article 7 of the Antitrust Regulation: this would mean sending a Statement of Objections to Google in the coming months, to which Google could formally respond in writing and during an Oral Hearing.”
Almunia ended his speech by reiterating that if a company does not comply with antitrust commitments the EC can impose a fine for that breach, without having to prove an infringement of antitrust rules — noting that such a fine was levied on Microsoft earlier this year, amounting to €561 million.
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