When I think about my connection with music, I think about three impulses: the impulse to discover, the impulse to buy, and the impulse to share. Here at Pandora we’ve had the discover and buy bits covered for some time, but it’s been frustrating to use Pandora to share the music you’re encountering with your friends. You could send an email or embed a widget on MySpace, but in the age of Twitter and Facebook our offering has been pretty spartan. That all changed tonight.
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. The first time you share on one of these networks, you’ll have to go through a series of pages that will connect your Pandora account with your Twitter or Facebook account. After that, it’s a just a simple click to share. When you post songs to Facebook your friends will be able to listen to samples right in their news feed. On Twitter we’ll post a shortened link to a page featuring just the song or station you shared.
This release also brings our station gifting feature to the foreground for the first time. Click the little present icon in the sharing toolbar and we’ll take you to a page where you can create an entirely new station to “give” to a friend. We’ll send it along to them in a fancy email, kind of like an electronic greeting card — or maybe more precisely, like a modern version of the mixtape.
Have fun playing with these new sharing features. Can’t wait to see what you discover…
— Tom
(CTO)
PS: want to see what other people are finding and posting to Twitter? Try using this Twitter search link.