Dear Spotify user,

Last week we were alerted to a group that managed to compromise our protocols. After investigating we concluded that this group had gained access to information that could allow testing of a very large number of passwords, possibly finding the right one. The information was exposed due to a bug that we discovered and fixed on December 19th, 2008. Until last week we were unaware that anyone had had access to our protocols to exploit it.

Not cool Spotify, not cool. Not good for PR or security online either for that matter.

Great work!

A quick search on Google brings about roughly 600,000 results, most of it reviews and comments from users of social media/social bookmarking sites and tech blogs. It’ll be interesting to follow.

Now, please take it to the next level and develop an iPhone application guys, that’d just make my day completely.

Check out the likes of Spotify Friends, Listply, Spotifylists, and Spotlists. Spotify has the potential to become another Facebook (or Google if you wish to go big) but for the music industry, offering its own bubble in which entrepreneurs will feed of any idea to create business opportunities. I’m consciously exaggerating here, but if you can only see one use for Spotify – think again.

One ‘bigger’ thought is; how long will it be until we see a lightweight software like Spotify – but for Video? Interesting …

Update; TKJ recently found this as well. 

The other day SoundCloud had their release. On the site reads that: “SoundCloud lets you move music fast & easy. The platform takes the daily hassle out of receiving, sending & distributing music for artists, record labels & other music professionals.” I’m not sure that this has been as big of an issue as they’d like to emphasize, but it will be interesting to see what comes out of it. Check out the video on the front page, quite cool.

Another service that I stumbled upon the other day is Hypem which really caught my attention. I normally stick to more ‘common’ resources for my music online, such as Last.fm or longer back; Pandora. But Hypem or “The Hype Machine” is really really clever and self-driven by thousands of bloggers. It collects data and music from blogs around the world and then presents it on the site with a clean interface and the possibility to listen to new blogged music in a pop-up player, even though the player at the bottom is sweet enough. If you want to see what music is the ‘buzz’ around the world, Hypem is really a one stop shop to get updated.

Spotify wrote on their blog today: “What this means to us, is that after just over two years, thousands of lines of code, and even more cups of coffee, Spotify will launch today. We plan to roll out invites to our free service gradually over the coming months, while premium access to Spotify has now been made fully available.”

Read more on the official blog from Spotify.

I found an old article about the founders Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzen at InternetWorld as well. Edit: Well, of course there was a new one on IDG as well, check it out.

Go Buy. Download. Watch. Whatever.

Pick of the year for sure.