Qloud, a Washington, DC based startup, recently launched a music search with social networking features and tagging. Qloud music search allows a number of search options as users can search for music by artist, song, keyword, genre or a number of other criteria. Upon finding a song it can be previewed, added to a wishlist, sent to a friend or purchased from a number of different music services (including AOL Music, Amazon and iTunes). An interesting feature is the ability to export any search to an
RSS feed, an email, or most importantly, a playlist to get onto your
iPod.
Qloud uses social networking to allow users to add friends, view their music preferences and their recent activities. Qloud enables users to better organize music collections with tagging via the use of the Qloud iTunes Plugin. Upon installing the Qloud iTunes Plugin I found it could definitely help to find music within iTunes. Though I did not experience it myself, I have heard that the Qloud iTunes Plugin install could cause iTunes to be shaky potentially fail. So proceed at your own risk. It was definitely something that iTunes was lacking though I presume they will now try to add the feature. The tagging feature is shown in the screen-shot below - click the screen-shot for a closer look.
Qloud has created a helpful Qloud tutorial as well as iTunes Plugin help to aid the adoption of the product. Also be sure to check out the Qloud blog. For other blogosphere perspectives visit GigaOm, Mashable! and PaulStamatiou.com.
Bottom-line: While reaching critical mass may be an obstacle, Qloud is a people powered music search engine which leverages tagging and other social networking hooks to enhance discovery of new music on the web.
