FoxyTunes + TwittyTunes plugins for Firefox

If you hadn’t noticed yet, I listen to a lot of music.

I wanted a fairly clean way to Twitter tracks I was listening to, without having to stop what I was doing to shift to Twitter to post what song I was listening to, especially if I’m in the midst of a bunch of things.

FoxyTunes is a Firefox plugin that allows you to control a bevy of music players right from your browser. Couple that with TwittyTunes, a plugin that you can use to with FoxyTunes to Twitter whatever track you’re playing at that time and you have an integrated music posting solution. Especially if you have your Facebook status pulling from Twitter.

FoxyTunes will even allow you to post what you’re listening to, when you’re posting on an online forum. It’s a really handy tool that includes finding lyrics and other such things, if that appeals to you.

Just another good way to maximize your usage and to share good tunes along the way.

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How Twitter puts the “social” in media

I was hesitant to join the Twitter revolution. In part because there must be something embedded within my personality that came from growing up listening to a record player that thinks it’s just plain silly. I started with a private one, in part because, I wasn’t sure how I would use it. I decided to change it yesterday and made it public again and I synced my Twitter with my Facebook status, as a way to leverage the usefulness of both.

For a while, I mocked the whole thing pretty bad. I mean, we’re derided enough as it is in our field, as time wasters. I don’t make it through a presentation without someone asking me, “How do these people get anything done?”

Now I’ve been schooled by the more savvy social media cognoscenti and I can see why it’d be useful, even if the way some people use it doesn’t resonate with me. I’ve taken to it as a place to dispose of random thoughts, but more importantly, as a venue to connect to people I’ve met in the social media space. I find it more personal — strangely — than Facebook in that way.

Whereas walled garden social networks are pretty useless for really doing much more than snooping on people you don’t know well, Twitter is a really good way to communicate, learn and interact with people whom you meet online. So it can deepen connections in a way that no other network can do.

Even if you’re just a consumer of information from someone you follow, it can be an excellent way to delve into the universe in a proactive way. For folks who simply don’t have time to blog or can’t think of very long posts, Twittering can be a way to grease the ideas skids and to start formulating ideas in a proactive way.

I’m still not completely sold on the medium and I am just as quick to deride it as others who simply don’t use it — after all — I can see very clearly the inanity of it all. But if you’re going to be involved in the social media space anyway, you might as well continue to find ways to maximize your participation.

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