, which launched in public beta today along with a plugin for iTunes, is a music search service with social features. You can search for artists, songs, keywords, styles and more, with Qloud serving up a list of tracks that you can preview on the site. You can then save the tracks to your favorites, email the results, link to the page or buy the individual tracks on iTunes, AOL Music Now or Amazon.
There are all kinds of social filters, too - like how recently the tracks have been rated, how highly they ve been rated and which tracks have been tagged or played the most. You can also narrow your search based on the demographics of the listeners.
Qloud is also a social network: you can visit profile pages, add users as friends and view their tags and channels.
The data about what music they ve been listening to comes from a plugin for iTunes and the open-source alternative Songbird, which not only adds tagging inside iTunes, but also publishes your listening habits to the Qloud site and allows you to organize these tracks into channels - the set up is similar to MOG, the so-called . is another good comparison. The plugin is PC only, with a Mac version coming soon.
Meanwhile, they ve come up with a way to incentivize users: a points system that rewards you for performing actions like tagging tracks, rating tracks and referring new users.
It s a neat service that looks incredibly slick, although the interface takes a lot of getting used to - I constantly forget to clear my old search before conducting a new one. That said, I m verging on the side of liking Qloud: it s still rough, but the intention is there.
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