Last.fm/audioscrobbler has come a long way in the last few months. I’m really digging the new interface, the tagging support, and the way it allows users to articulate their relationships with associates within the last.fm social network. I’d like to see them add some visualizations both on social networks and artist networks. Perhaps something along the lines of Orpheus.
It’s cool to see the little bar charts, but some more dynamic, interactive and visually appealling visualizations would facilitate browsing and exploration better. Audioscrobbler recently exposed a web services api to their data, which is very kind of them. This may make it so a third party can write visualization tools, although I’m not sure how efficient it will be. I’ve seen some other services try to visualize data via a web services API, and while the visualizations work, they seem kind of sluggish. I don’t actually know if the poor performance is due to data transfer/query overhead or just poor design, but the former would explain it.
I’m still having some problems with authentication since I have the audioscrobbler plug-in on my mac and PC. Trying to have both plug-ins running causes clashes during auth. handshake. Understandable, but annoying nonetheless! I lost all of my previously played tracks on Friday as I was trying to solve this problem. Boo-hoo! So sad.
All things considered, these guys are really doing cool stuff.