Twisten.fm is a hot new app in the online music mash-up world that’s been getting a lot of blog love in the past week. From their website:
“Twisten.fm crawls Twitter for tweets about music. Then you listen to them.”
The Twisten.fm homepage is a view similar to a Twitter stream – chronologically sorted tweets – except on Twisten.fm, all the tweets are about music and all the tweets contain a link to Grooveshark that allow you to listen to the song the tweet is about. Twisten.fm was created by employees (and I assume other resources) at Grooveshark.
Here’s the catch, though. It appears as if Twisten.fm doesn’t actually crawl for tweets about music. It only catches tweets that link to online music services – including their own site and Grooveshark’s site, but includes other sites like imeem, Last.fm and Blip.fm.
And then there’s the dishonest part: when displaying the tweet on their page, if the link isn’t to Grooveshark or Twisten.fm, they replace the original link with one to Grooveshark. This modification isn’t noted and they don’t provide a link back to the original tweet, so unless you do some investigating, you would never know that all those people that show up in the stream on the Twisten.fm homepage aren’t in fact tweeting about Twisten.fm or Grooveshark.
What they’re doing is wrong because they’re taking content created by someone else, altering it, and then presenting it as if it were the original. If I linked to a song on Last.fm, I probably want to link to Last.fm for a reason. And I definitely don’t want anyone putting words in my mouth, which is effectively what Twisten.fm is doing.
I think that Twisten.fm is a neat idea, but they need to fix this ASAP. There are a few ways to make this right, but the best way is preserve the original tweet when displaying it, link to the original on Twitter, and provide the Grooveshark link as separate from the original tweet.
This would in no way diminish the value of their service — they would still be aggregating the same music related tweets and driving traffic to Grooveshark while at the same time ensuring they remain good Internet citizens.
Update! Twisten.fm has updated their site! They now provide a link to the original tweet, and the link is in the form of the icon of the service that the original tweet linked to! Go check it out. Great job, twisten !