Google is now starting to show aggressiveness when it comes to its online presence. One of the things that it has set focus on this month is the Google PlayMusic. While it has always been dubbed to be mediocre in nature as far as services are concerned, the search titan made sure it will be updated and given new features so as to attract more users. Indeed, just recently, users are enjoying the new features of Google Play Music. These features, however, are for testing. Google will be testing them out to know if they will indeed make a significant impact to the following of this service. If not, then the company will be finding another way to lure people to patronize its products.
For now, there are three key features added by Google and they are as follows:
1. Desktop Notifications - A light application will run in the background to notify you about a music. It works like other notification applications available on the web right now. What this desktop notification program does is that it tells you when a new song or music is playing. The information that will be provided via a small interface is the title of the music, the artist, title of the album it belongs, and shows the album cover. If you’ve been a Windows OS user for so long, you should have tried using Windows Media Player or Winamp to play music. Both of these programs will notify you through a small interface that would popup when a new track is playing. Google Play Music functions the same only that it will use Google Chrome browser to do so. And just in case you’re wondering, other browsers will not be able to do this, only Chrome from Google.
2. HTML5 Audio Support - Unlike the typical streamer or browser music players, it does not require flash to play music. Any browser that supports HTML5 like IE9, Google Chrome, Safari, etc. are the ones that could play music. The new HTML5 standard is responsible for this. So, even if you don’t have Adobe Flash installed on your computer, you will be able to play music without any problem. That would definitely eliminate the hassle of installing Flash whenever you haven’t. Besides, Flash is a bit heavy to load and oftentimes causes Google Chrome to stop working.
3. 5-Star Ratings - Others may think that ratings are useless in multimedia world but it is important and convenient way of marking songs and albums you really like so that the next time you will find them, you can filter the ones you marked as “5 Star” and so on. Or, you can simply show the music which are star-marked irrespective of their ratings. This method also works in Windows’ native music players and it has never received any objection from users ever.
For sure Google has a lot of things in store for its loyal patrons. In fact, there is good news for Google+ users because it recently received a significant revamp making it more attractive, easy-to-navigate and simple to use. Google Play Music update is actually just one of the things Google has in mind.
