So apparently Google has added a music tracking option to Google talk. They’ve made the top tracks by genre publicly available, so you can check out which songs are actually popular and being listened to (as opposed to just what’s on the radio). While Google Talk is hardly a huge sample population, it still is a pretty sizable sample, though definitely skewed more toward the techy crown. I see this a lot like what Xfire does for games with our top 10 list on the homepage – you’re able to see what people are actually PLAYING, not just what sells at the retail counter. We go one better by giving you the number of minutes played, though we don’t do it by game genre.
So then I was thinking – there’s no real reason the Xfire Plus team couldn’t do something similar for Xfire. If you haven’t heard of Xfire Plus before, you really should swing by their site. They’ve got a bunch of cool plugins for Xfire, including a cross-IM service, a web version of Xfire, as well as a music plugin that will display your current music in your Xfire status. Theoretically they could have an opt-in option that would upload that music to a similar list on their site. Their news page says they’ve passed 7000 unique users of the plugin, so that’s pretty good in my book.
::Kiskis::
