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Friday, April 12, 2013

New Twitter Service Revolutionizes Online Music with 10-Second Songs

SAN NARCISO, Calif. (Bennington Vale Evening Transcript) -- Twitter, the omnipresent social networking tool that perfectly integrates with our ADHD society, could roll out its much anticipated music service on Friday. On Thursday, Twitter confirmed its acquisition of We Are Hunted, a San Francisco-based music offering that tracks popular songs across the Internet and social media. The company had already been working on an app for Twitter, which was expected to be released this week to coincide with the 2013 Coachella music festival. One of the main features of Twitter's latest development is the system's ability to recommend songs and artists that cater to an individual's likely preferences, based on the accounts that user follows. But the music service's primary appeal, like Twitter's micro-blogging aspect, comes from its inherent limitations, according to company representatives: Twitter Music pares down songs to the few essential bars listeners want in today's busy world -- 9.6 seconds, to be precise.

Capitalizing on We Are Hunted's discovery service, Twitter Music scours the Internet to identify trending songs and artists that reflect the tastes of people who are discussing the music or streaming it online. The launch of Twitter Music follows a series of similar moves that began last year, intended to broaden the range of Twitter's functionality.

Last April, Twitter unveiled its first professional suite of micro-blogging services. The ubiquitous social broadcast tool now provides targeted services for individual industries.

TwitScholar offers an economical approach to helping public schools meet the increased demands of state and federal testing requirements. By eliminating the cumbersome paper processes of standardized tests, along with the challenge of subjectively grading essay tests that lend themselves to excessive interpretation, TwitScholar forces students to respond directly. There's little margin for error and virtually no room for "B.S. or fluff that fails to answer the questions," according to Frida Kline, a public relations executive for the technology innovator.

In the same spirit of eliminating word waste and confusion, TwitProcurePro provides an online capture system for organizations that rely on Requests for Proposals (RFPs) to bid their business.

Kline confirmed that the basic premise behind both offerings remains close to the core philosophy of Twitter: "If you can't get your point across in 140 characters, you've failed to communicate effectively."

Twitter Music chants the same mantra, promising to remain consistent with the company's established platform.

"We've applied the same empirical analysis to music as we have to communications," Kline stated. "And what we discovered, not surprisingly, is that there's a lot of dead space and wasted time in any given song. Some vamp too long before getting to the melody. Twitter is abouting eliminating this conceptual white noise. Some songs are so tedious, people tune out until the chorus. So that's all Twitter Music plays for those selections."

Kline reiterated that Twitter is about "headlines" -- providing a summarized user experience to enable better decision making.

"People post highlights of interesting topics for others to see. If the headline grabs attention, much like a newspaper, then readers will follow the link to get the rest of the story," Kline continued. "If not, they ignore the post and get on with their lives. Why should new music be any different?"

Kline doesn't believe listeners need the unduly long 30- to 60-second previews that iTunes and Google Play provide.

"We're employing equivalent algorithms and 'character lengths,' if you want to call them that, to arrive at the necessary duration for a song preview," she explained. "And that's less than 10 seconds. If you don't like a song during that time, it won't get any better. It's already failed you."

The Twitter Music equation takes the 140-character word limit and translates it to a song.

The average song lasts about four minutes, or 240 seconds. Based on typical word counts for lyrics, that's about 3,000 characters.

Twitter divides the 3,000 characters by its standard 140 limitation to arrive at .04. The system then multiplies the 240 seconds by .04 to determine the optimal length of a song -- -9.6 seconds.

2013. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License. See disclaimers.

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