Pandora‘s a great Internet radio service, but it usually only serves as background music. You know, your friends come over, you pick a genre or artist to set the mood, and then you let Pandora do the rest. Well the company has just broadened its scope this morning, integrating social media sharing tools.
The company’s CTO, Tom Conrad shared in a blog post, “With our new release we’ve added a sharing toolbar above the player so you’re always just a click away from sharing a song or a station with your friends on Facebook and Twitter.”
So Pandora has decided to integrate Facebook and Twitter. With the new funcitonality, users can connect their accounts with Pandora and then share their music across the social networks.
On Facebook, if a Pandora user shares a song with a friend, that song will be directly embedded onto that persons news feed. The user doesn’t have to exit Facebook to check out the song sample. If a user shares a song on Twitter, Pandora will post a shortened link to a page featuring just that specific song or station.
Interesting to note that Pandora did have sharing features before these additions. The company had an embeddable widget which functioned with MySpace. Pandora admits, “in the age of Twitter and Facebook our offering has been pretty spartan.” You definitely won’t find a MySpace button in Pandora’s foreground.
Pandora also brought to the foreground its gifting feature which allows users to create radio stations to “give” to a friend. Pandora sends these gifts via email or what it calls, “a modern version of the mixtape.”
These social media features aren’t available yet on its mobile applications.
