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FoxyTunes — Everyone a DJ

Behold the power of mash-ups: with this you, too can be a well connected music jockey. When you add Twitter and FoxyTunes to Firefox, you get “FoxyTunes Twitter DJ.” Here for example is my FoxyTunes Twitter DJ play list page and then, here is the official FoxyTunes Twitter DJ page.

These are awful, alpha-version names for something so easy to use. After you plug in all the parts — Firefox, Twitter, FoxyTunes itself, and your music source(s) — publishing your play list is a two-step process.

1 — Listen to music while you use the Internet.
2 — As you hear a track you want to share, click a link.

When you click a link in the FoxyTunes area of Firefox, FoxyTunes publishes linked tweets in your Twitter. Each tweet links to a super-page for the track you are sharing, and from there also publishes shared tracks to a fully connected, public play list.

On your play list page, each track you publish is again linked to its super-page. What’s so super about the track pages? Track pages are automatically populated with data from Wikipedia, YouTube, Last.fm, Yahoo! Music, Flickr, Amazon, and more, including videos, lyrics, musician profiles, related artists, etc. For an example, see the page for “Maria Maria” by Santana — it’s super!

The main feature on your play list page is a big, simple link that says “play all.” When you play all, a player opens in a panel over top of the same page. The player is fully loaded with top YouTube videos matching the tracks in your play list. You can listen and watch at the default size or full-screen, one track at a time or run the whole play list with no further interaction required. Here again for examples are my FoxyTunes Twitter DJ play list page and the official FoxyTunes Twitter DJ page.

Once you have FoxyTunes hooked up, then with just the minimum effort, you can share your music in style. There are many other means to this end, but they are all more labor-intensive. This is by far the laziest, most legal way to nicely share your favorite tracks with people you know and everyone you don’t.

The default content, connections, and wrapping are all state of the art. The track pages, YouTube videos, and audio are all as good as the wisdom of the crowd and cloud, so it’s not always perfect. For so little work on your part though, it’s far better than you could do alone.

Of FoxyTunes, I say: may it live long, and prosper.

Give it a try by starting with the official FoxyTunes Twitter DJ page.

Update: Since I began using FoxyTunes, FoxyTunes joined Yahoo! and FoxyTunes runs on Internet Explorer 7+ in addition to Firefox 2+.

For DJs who want more control, it’s easy enough to trade more work for better results while still riding FoxyTunes. You can easily add your own text per track that you publish to Twitter — that ability is built into FoxyTunes. You could also bypass FoxyTunes in your browser, but otherwise publish to Twitter using a combination of your custom content and FoxyTunes’ syntax, which then triggers the play list building down stream. You could edit Wikipedia and publish custom videos to YouTube, connecting those dots to tracks you associate with in FoxyTunes.

In the end, you could take your play list and restyle it on your own site, blog, or profile page. With all the tools and samples available to developers, designers, hackers, crackers, makers, bakers, and hangers-on these days, you can publish your FoxyTunes Twitter DJ play list just-so. I found enough magic in all the defaults, but someone publishing more professionally could get still more from FoxyTunes Twitter DJ.