mflow - (Finally) Bringing iTunes and Twitter Together

We’ve been playing about with mflow for a few months now, but since it’s turned up on Mashable’s radar, we thought it was about time we had a quick look at it.

Broadly speaking, mflow is a music social network with the emphasis on the social. Forget about myspace and Ping, this is not about artists having their own customisable space. This is about discovering music through the recommendations of others. It’s what Spotify still hasn’t got right.

mflow works just like a Twitter feed. You start off by following people (best to start by finding artists/albums you like and following people who have ‘flowed’ that). When they ‘flow’ a track it appears in your inbox and you can listen to the full thing, unrestricted, once. After that it appears as a 30 second preview clip. Follow enough people with music tastes you like and you end up with a customised music recommendation feed.

If you buy anything that’s been flowed to you, the person who originally flowed it gets 20% of what you pay for it. Of course, the same holds true if someone buys something you flow. It’s a nice little incentive for people to actively recommend music, rather than just lurking and enjoying everyone else’s hard work.

There’s no real way of interacting on mflow, beyond the 140 character messages you can attach to tracks, so you’re not going to make friends using it. However, it is a really fun way of discovering new music. And since it’s now available as a browser based HTML 5 app (alongside the original desktop app), it’s probably the most hassle free way of listening to music at work.

We’re not ones to go gaga at every new social media development, but mflow is a genuinely great idea that works well.