Some People Benefited From the Skype Outage

Alexa stats up to August 17 show a massive rise in traffic to Skype competitor Gizmo Project and a more modest rise for Grand Central at the peak of this weeks 36 hour Skype outage.

The SIPphone owned Gizmo Project offers a nearly identical package to Skype, but with added features including built in recording, and cross platform compatibility. Gizmo’s traffic tripled in the space of three days and rose to a rank of 8,561 in Alexa from a 3 month average of 19,102.

The Google owned Grand Central offers a one number everywhere telephone service. Whilst the service doesn’t compete with Skype in the softphone market, the service does provide functionality that competes with Skype services such as Skype In. According to Alexa, Grand Central hit a 4 week high on Friday with a 33% increase in rank over its 3 month average.

Apple Gets Into Social Music Scene with My iTunes

Apple isn’t just sitting on the sidelines as startups like iLike and MOG and others try to tackle the social music space. Many of these services gather user music preferences via an iTunes plugin. You are then able to tell the world what music you are listening to, get recommendations for new music you might like, etc. People love this stuff, as evidenced by iLike’s ridiculous growth and Last.fm’s $280 million acquisition by CBS.

Apple has launched My ITunes, a set of widgets that may be a first step in taking their fair share of the social music market. Niall Kennedy caught sight of it a couple of days ago.

iTunes is giving you an effortless way to keep your friends up-to-date with your favorite music, TV shows, movies, and more. My iTunes widgets are simple, self-updating add-ons for your web page, social-networking profile, or blog.

Use My iTunes to share your top reviews, favorite artists, and new music, movies, and TV shows from the iTunes Store with anyone who visits your site.

There are currently three embeddable widgets to choose from. One shows recent iTunes purchases. Another shows music you’ve reviewed on iTunes. The last shows a sort of tag cloud of artists you’ve purchased on the iTunes store. The widgets can be customized by size and color.

The first and last widgets only work if you’ve actually bought stuff on iTunes. I’ve bought enough things to create a thinly populated widget below. But what would be far more interesting is a widget that, like iLike, shows your favorite music and plays at least a 30 second snippet of each song.