Twitter   

I've been on Twitter for a while now, but never really use it much and certainly never thought to see if the boys from Phish were on there. Well today someone pointed me to Page McConnell on Twitter and boy am I glad they did.

As if I weren't psyched enough for Hampton, his most recent Tweet amped it up to 11…

Page_McConnell is absolutely amazed, exhausted and exhilarated, but it'll all be worth it! We promise

Sweet action. A personal sentiment from the Chairman plus a promise that Hampton won't suck, all in about 85 characters.

Update (February 26, 2009, 7:30am) Oh snap. A comment from Scotty B has me questioning the authenticity of this Twitter account, but either way it got me kinda pumped so I'm leaving it up here.

Update (February 26, 2009, 4:00pm) Well the super-sleuths at Hidden Track have officially debunked Page's Twitter account as being fake, confirmed by Phish’s publicist in a post brilliantly subtitled “Fake It Leo.”

Now back to the original post…

And it's not just (fake) Page blazing the Twitter trail. You can also follow Phish on Twitter (see postscript below) and Mike Gordon on Twitter too. And someone's also tweeting (albeit very infrequently) as Trey Anastasio on Twitter, but I've got a feeling it's not the real McCoy.

That leaves Fishman.

But when I searched for Jon Fishman on Twitter I got bubkus, so I went ahead and signed him up. Hey Henrietta, if you're out there and you want your name back just shoot me an email. It's yours for the asking.

P.S. To whom it may concern at Red Light… feel free to use Twitter as more than just a minimalist press release feed. See Jimmy Eat World's innovative use of Twitter for inspiration.

P.P.S. If for some insane reason you'd like to follow me on Twitter, go here.

I just discovered Twisten.fm, a ten day old website powered by Grooveshark that crawls through tweets to see what people are listening to, then lets you listen to those songs via a simple interface.

A casual scroll down the home page feed (see below) will give you a nice glimpse at the variety of music people are enjoying right now, though I kinda wish I could set it to auto-refresh.

As a bonus, if you log in using your Twitter account, you'll gain the ability to tweet right from their site and maintain a favorites list making it easy to find songs again later. And there's another bonus at Twisten.fm Twitter account which is update hourly with the most popular song.

One thing I really would've like to see is some playlist functionality — or as someone on their customer service board called it, a “stream the songs radio player.” Twisten competitor Hype Machine does playlists really well, whereas listening to free music on Twisten.fm is a cumbersome one-track-at-a-time experience.

And I'm most excited about an idea I saw over at the Twisten review on Infinate Dial — “friend radio networks” that only stream songs from a list of Twitter users you select. Or perhaps people could even create sharable public “stations” based on different groupings of users.

Overall Twisten.fm is a novel and simple way to discover and listen to free music that people are tweeting about. However, the lack of a radio player will probably keep me away from now.

P.S. I'm sure they'll be adding features over time, so head over to the Twisten.fm blog for news and announcements.

Update (February 13, 2009, 8:00pm) I just got an email from one of Twisten's engineers who said, “a radio style player is definitely in the works along with a few other goodies.” Sweet.

Find 5 more great free music sites on Jamtopia.