Mentor FM Tunes Into Your Facebook Account To Play Music You Like
Mentor FM is one of those tools that it is pretty awesome and scary at the same time. The Internet radio tunes into your Facebook account to play music that you like. The awesome part is that it usually gets things pretty right in this regard. All you need to do is to give the app permissions to connect to your Facebook account before you can start listening to a playlist that has been specifically made for you.
The scary part is actually what makes the application that good: Facebook seems to know your music taste pretty well. The application displays up and down vote buttons on the radio page that you can use to further finetune the music listening experience.
Basic playback controls are displayed on the page as well. Here you can change the volume of the music, pause, stop and play songs or skip ahead to the next song if you do not really like the one that is currently playing.
Mentor.fm displays the artist or band, and the genre of the music on the page as well. It feels rather strange that the name of the song is not among the information displayed there.
If the playlist is not what you are looking for, you can let the radio station load a new playlist with different songs.
The surprise me mode finally lets you look beyond your music taste to discover a different kind of music. When I first used surprise me the radio started to play songs from artists such as Emilio Santiago, Jazzkantine or Renata Tebaldi, music that I would not listen to at all otherwise.
The site is a music experiment, that will be online for about 2 months before the makers will take it offline again. One of the interesting aspects of the site is that you can just turn on the radio and start listening, without having to perform searches or songs first. The service uses a user's likes on Facebook and generates the playlist from those information. (via Freeware Genius)
Advertisement
I guess it’s invite only, I got this message when tried out the app.
“The registration of new users is invite-only.
Mentor.FN is an academic research project and we have enough users to test our techniques. You are registered to Mentor.FM but at the moment you can’t use the radio because you don’t have an invitation.
We will send you an email if your user will be selected for an additional test session. You can also keep in contact with Mentor.FM via the Facebook page. “
Very nice! And really, it guesses right music pretty well.