Spotify goes iPhone and US (soon)

Spotify the Swedish music streaming company (which has players for Mac and Windows) has now launched an iPhone version.

It's been in the queue with Apple for about a month, but was finally given approval yesterday. Many feared it wouldn't make the app store as it competes with Apple's own iTunes service.

Spotify on iPhone will only be available to users who subscribe to their £9.99 per month service, though the application is a free download. Spotify expect the iPhone app to drive new customers to their premium services.

The app allows sync'ed playlists with the desktop version and other features.

US customers still have to wait until Spotify complete licensing deals with the stakeholders in the US, but a launch there is expected next year, though some lucky US people have had pre-launch invites.

Spotify is also rumored to be in talks with Facebook who have been lacking a music service so far, a FB/Spotify tie-up would seriously impinge MySpace's youth music market.

Whichever way you look at it, Spotify are a company to watch, hopefully they'll not get bought out by Facebook or other US giant and can be a genuine European success story.

Facebook is growing fast

Facebook is definately the new craze and is growing like mad. Everyone seems to be joining, the same faces from other social networking sites, interestingly business users and consumers alike.

The interface is much more organised than say MySpace and much easier to read/navigate around. It seems "more friendly" too.

Google's Orkut gained a huge popularity when they launched (invite only - which made it geeky cool), but it rapidly seemed to lose it's steam.

While MySpace is huge, Facebook must be catching up. Facebook also rarely has errors while accessing areas etc, so they've obviously thought hard and long about scalability from the beginning.

A major plus for Facebook is that they've opened it up so developers can access the gubbins below and build applications - techy heaven - but it also means stuff gets developed that users want (and that Facebook might not have resources to do themselves).

It looks like it's here to stay.