You are in a coffee shop/bar/store/restaurant and heard some great music and wanted to know the name of the song, the name of the band, or the album it is play on?

How many times have you stood in line or hung around long enough to get someone’s attention to ask? Of course even if you do, one of the following the bound to happen:

1. The song is no longer playing
2. The employee can’t (or won’t be bothered) to figure it out.
3. They tell you the wrong thing. (This could be innocent or malicious depending on what the attitude factor in the store is and whether the employee deems you worthy of imparting this information to. A good rule of the thumb is the great the ratio of tattoos and piercings between you and the employee, the less likely you are to find out. I am not sure what the magic number is but I can guarantee this, if the party in question has 5x the number of tats and holes in their body that you do, you are not going to get the name of that song.).
4. You will forget the name of the band or lose the scrap of paper you illegibly scribbled it down on by the time you get to someplace you can look up the band or buy the song on iTunes Amazon.

This is a perfect application of a Twitter-based microblog.

I see Twitter get used for a lot of stupid stuff. This would be a great use. Compare the scenario above to this one:

You hear that a song come on the over the in-store sound system. You realize that this is the best thing that has happened to you since (insert your own scenario here. Mine involves several manhattan’s). You open another tab in Firefox and go to the website for the coffee shop you are working in. You go to their What is Playing RSS feed (CoffeeShopFoo.foo/rss/WhatIsPlaying) and subscribe or link to their Twitter feed. You look at the last 1-2 entries and make an intelligent guess about which one is playing. Worst case, you conduct a couple of quick Web searches to double-check the name of the song.

This would be easy pretty easy to implement and then charge stores a few dollars a month for the service.

It could be implemented using combination of MP3 software and Twitter connection. A lot of the MP3 applications either can be extended via plug-ins or can be connected to other software via client side scripting. Use these to connect to Twitter and then start posting.

Who knows, there may be people doing this already. If so – drop me a line.

If not, let me know in the comments if you try it.