TechAddress

MixTurtle Music Search Is Fast. Real Fast.

Sun, 20 Jul 2008 20:33:17 +0000

As has been widely reported by tech media outlets for a few days now, Facebook filed a lawsuit against studiVZ Ltd. in California federal court on Friday claiming the German network had copied its “look, feel, features and services.” Today the recipient of the suit issued a public response on the matter. StudiVZ said that prior to Facebook’s own filing in the U.S., lawyers representing Palo Alto-based network had communicated messages that “prompted studiVZ to file for a declaratory judgment at the District Court in Stuttgart, Germany” the same day. StudiVZ would not elaborate as of yet, however, saying that it had not been formally served with Facebook’s complaint, and therefore “cannot comment in detail about the content of the claims.”

StudiVZ CEO Marcus Riecke delivered a statement along with the company’s brief summary of Friday’s events:

“Now that Facebook, despite trying hard, has not been successful in the German market, the company seeks to obstruct studiVZ through court action. Their strategy appears to be: If you can’t beat them, sue them.

“There are numerous social networks. Facebook was not the first and certainly isn’t the only one. By attempting to harm studiVZ through a meritless California lawsuit, Facebook is arrogantly laying claim to an international monopoly over social networking sites that the facts show it does not deserve.”

Source:Mashable!

Combine the element of Web search with music playback and a mohawk-sporting, ciggie-smoking dinosaur, and you get MixTurtle, a new service that works as you might expect it to. Just click and play.

Ajax is responsible making it behave as it does. Some might consider it bit too heavy on the large print. Everything but the topmost menu is sized big. But this is fairly easy to get accustomed to. And there’s an upside to the design choice. The results are easy to make sense of. If your music search produces an especially large volume of material, this can really prove helpful in finding what you’re looking for.

Most impressive with MixTurtle, whose content sources are absent the picture, is the sheer speed with which information is displayed. Begin to type a keyword, and you’re immediately shown a selection of choices in a drop-down overlay. You can select one listed or continue with your query by manually inputting any desired text. Once you’ve entered your search, the rate of return is all but instant. I don’t recall testing any other engine with such alacrity. Not Seeqpod, not Songza, not any other. This little reptile has one heck of a rocket affixed to its rear, for sure.

The rest of the engine is fairly self-explanatory. As noted directly above the results box, you can add songs to a playlist, which you can call on any subsequently visit once you sign up for a free account.

To play back music, you click the artist/track label. Click again to pause. A slim submenu emerges directly below the chosen song, which displays the buffer bar, the number of sources discovered to hold said track, and an option to browse other sources. That last item may not prove too useful, however, since MixTurtle automatically begins to plays a song. (Note: sometimes a request or a user name and password will surface for a particular track.)