I promised I would talk a little about last.fm once more features opened up for me, and I’m here today to do that. In a nutshell, last.fm is another one of those community sites, or social site if you will. Here, you install a plugin to your media player, and listen to music as you normally would. Each song you play, it reads the ID3 tags and sends the information to the server. After listening to 200 or so songs, it will start to recommend other music to you. These recommendations are based on what other people have listened to, that have also listened to some of the same music you have. Lot’s of fancy algorithms running around in the background take care of everything for you. I get the feeling that it’s rather resource expensive, because updates aren’t done in real-time, only hourly, daily and sometimes weekly.

It’s all very Web 2.0y as well. You can create groups, tag stuff, fumble around all hours of the day when you should be working. There’s also neighbours. These are people that have very similar musical tastes as you, and are automatically added to your neighbour list. From there, you can see what they listen to, even subscribe to an RSS feed of their playlists.

The radio is nice as well. They have the licenses to stream music to you, which comes with many different playlists. You can play the group radio, which plays songs from everyone in your group. You can play your neighbours radio, which is from their playlist. Best of all, you can just sample 30 seconds of a lot of songs. Now, if only there was a way to actually purchase the music you get recommended.

All in all, it’s a great experience. I’ve found so many great bands and albums finally. As with all community sites like this, to really get the most/best out of it, you have to spend a great deal of time with it. I just wanted to find some new music, and it’s helped me do that. I don’t feel as though I’m getting the most out of it though, since I don’t go looking for other people to talk to and make friends with. I don’t have time for the friends I already have.