Soundtrckr, a “geosocial” music service for iPhone, iPod Touch and the Web, recently issued two feature updates for its iPhone application.
Users can create stations from any artist in the soundtrckr catalogue, as well as determine the current location of their friends and listeners.
These feature enhancements to the service build on its ability to create personalized radio stations in various formats, the company said, and also optimize its “location-aware” social network to help users build communities of music fans.
Soundtrckr Founder/CEO Daniele Calabrese said users wanted to be able to create stations beyond what was in their handset, “and to see where their friends and listeners were around the country.”
Geosocial networking, the company says, is social networking in which geographic services and capabilities such as geocoding and geotagging are used to enable additional social dynamics. User-submitted location data or geolocation techniques can allow social networks to connect and coordinate users with local people or events that match their interests.
With soundtrckr, users can create and share their own stations, seeding playlists from the company’s music database. A Washington user might create a station of ’80s Russian pop hits, then tweets a link to her station; a friend in San Francisco decides to tune in; using soundtrckr, the friend can listen along in real time, song-for-song. Word spreads; as more people tune into the station, each listener can determine the others’ locations, converse through an integrated TCP/IP chat feature and share the station with their own friends via Facebook, Twitter or e-mail.
