New features at last.fm

Social music website last.fm has a bunch of new features:
  • Flash-based player - no need for a download and install to take advantage of streaming music - a bonus this means that last.fm streaming now works on Solaris machines. <w00t!>
  • Concert notification - find out what concerts and events are happening in your area (or in your friends area).
  • Free Downloads - 100,000 free tracks to download (I can hear the sound of thousands of MIR researchers pointing their wget script at last.fm even as I write this).
  • taste-o-meter - very similar to iLike's  user-compatible rating system.  Now when you browse a user at last.fm you get to see how well their music taste agrees with yours:



last.fm also seems to have scattered little improvements throughout the site - more album art, better layouts, better integration of their social featurs (such as journals).

I did notice that the event system is a little buggy. I typed in 'Boston' for my city and I was offered a choice of Boston in Alabama, Arkansas, Connecticut, Indiana and Kentucky, but no Boston Massachusetts. When I put in Nashua NH, all was well, and I learned that Death Cab for Cutie  will be in Boston tommorrow night and The Who will be in Boston on December 2.  Pretty cool!

last.fm is one of my favorite social music sites. It's good to see they are keeping things fresh.

Posted on: Nov 01, 2006

Posted by: plamere

Category: music

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Comments:

Hi Paul! New is also the personal and neighbor radio stream (flash only for the moment), which is the first "step" of a new algorithm that will be improved in the next months. The taste-o-meter is currently a kinda naive implementation that will be upgraded next week (the guy who created it did not know that I had much better data for it). New (and much better) artists similarity will be online prob. tomorrow, but I have another version which for very popular artists works better. I need to think how to integrate the two though.. New neighbors computation and recommendation is also coming, and also some stuff I can't talk about! ;) Sooo.. plenty of cool stuff coming. I hope you will keep enjoying last.fm! :)

Posted by Norman on November 01, 2006 at 03:16 PM EST #

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