Defender of the Free Refill

Attention-grabbing headline, eh? I was going to title this There’s Lots of Room for You on the Bandwagon, but I couldn’t pass up the shock value.

Anywho, the fun-loving cobblers at Last.fm have finally released an audioscrobbler player that works on my operating system, so I decided to try it out.

In stark contrast to its disturbingly eschatological name, Last.fm is nothing more calamitous than a little computer program that watches what music you listen to and logs it remotely. That lets you do two things: browse the site’s recommendations based on what you listen to, and share your song info with others.

So if you want to know what I’ve been listening to, all you have to do is visit http://www.last.fm/user/n8willis/. Well, actually that’s just a summary page; recent tracks is the feature I was referring to.

There are plugins and whatnot to embed this info in WordPress, but I haven’t gotten around to them. And like every other “social computing” site to pop out of VC over the last couple of years, the Last.fm site is strewn deeply with buzzword compliance like groups and tags. They don’t add anything to the service, they just make you want to spend a few minutes at the automatic Web 2.0 BS Generator to unwind.