No one's quite gotten social right with regards to music software yet. Zune failed, Ping is still awkward, and no one ever liked the Facebook music add-ons. Last.fm is the closest anyone's gotten to doing social music, and even it acts more as an encyclopedia of tunage than a tool with which to connect. But a new widget is out in the tubes, and it's actually pretty fun for its lack of pretension.

Turntable.fm doesn't seek to be "the next thing" in social media. It's not going to connect you to all your friends or revolutionize the way you think about music. It's just the equivalent of an online DJ club. You sign in with Facebook, then enter a chat room and listen to other people spin tracks. Participate and you might get chosen to DJ in a given room as well. You can also start up your own music room with your buddies if they happen to be online at the same time as you--say, if you're hosting a real world party and you want to create a collaborative online playlist so people aren't squabbling over which Lady Gaga video to play next.

It's also a fun way to discover new music that's actually chosen by a human, not a Pandora-bot. You can chat and interact with your DJs, so if you have questions about whatever they're playing, you can just ask. Turntable.fm brings that real time human connection back to the concept of radio.

Even radio--the old school, analog kind--used to be social in its own way. When you heard a song on your favorite station you knew it was a real, live person playing it. You could call in and request a song. Sometimes your request would even be granted. And even if you were just tuning in for a brief moment, you knew that when you magically turned on to the beginning of your favorite song by coincidence, there would be hundreds of other people rocking out to the same tune at the exact same time. Radio wasn't a vacuum like iPods and Pandora are vacuums. It wasn't built "just for you" on a false model of individualism. It was a community construct, meant to unite people with similar listening tastes. What Turntable.fm does is actually pretty damn impressive; it refills the vacuum of mp3 culture with real-time music-based socialization. 

Turntable.fm's still a new feature, so it has yet to be seen exactly if and how people are going to use it. Plenty of net users are still hung up on the individualism thing and won't take anything less than their own private music library. But those who are fond of Pandora might see new appeal in a similar widget that incorporates human contact. It's not quite as "sciencey" as Pandora--it doesn't calibrate your exact taste based on your recommendations--but it also opens you up to finding new things way out of left field where you might not have found them with trend-based recommendation software. And it gives you the potential to engage actively with your recommender, instead of just yelling at the screen, "why do you play the same OK Go song every time I sign on?"

If you're in the sixteenth of the world population that has a Facebook account, you can probably go ahead and start using Turntable.fm right now (you need to have a friend who uses it in order to sign on in beta mode). Check it out, and see whether it's the future of social music for you.