Soundwave Lets You See What Woz (and Your Friends) Are Listening To

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What do Woz and Stephen Fry have in common, besides a fascination with technology and love of all things Apple? The answer: They’ve both been using (and plugging) a free iPhone app from Ireland called Soundwave Music Discovery that lets you see — in some rather novel ways — what other people are listening to. In a way, it’s sort of like Twitter for music.

Start listening to a song while Soundwave is running and the app automatically posts it to your profile, and to the feed of anyone following you; that includes not just songs played locally from your iPhone, but also songs played from popular streaming services Rdio and Spotify.

Another really cool feature lets you draw a circle on a map to see what people in the circle are listening to. Of course, they’ll need to be running the app.

Soundwave already seems to have attracted a few big names. Besides Stephen Fry and Steve Wozniak, there’s entertainment mogul and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, and, not surprisingly, a bunch of Irish sports and entertainment personalities I’ve never heard of (it’s not surprising they’re Irish, not not surprising I’ve never heard of them; though I suppose that’s not surprising either).

Brendan O’Driscoll, Soundwave’s founder and CEO, tells us that the app’s already blown through 150K downloads and tracked two million songs played since it launched last month — which means someone you know is bound to be using it.

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