The awesome social music networking site Last.fm has gone live with it's updates/upgrades for the summer, and things are looking pretty sexy.I've been using Last.fm in one guise or another for the last three years. I love having charts and history of my listening habits, since music is one of the true loves of my life (taking a distant second to my incomparable wife of course). Given that the Internet is another of my loves, the chance to combine the two is irresistible – thinking about the number of music CDs and DVDs I've bought from Amazon over the years shows just how irresistible. A site that not only tracks my listening habits and allows me to share them with others, discover new music and fellow music lovers based on my personal tastes, and listen to my music from any internet-enabled computer anywhere? That's pure gold.
For some time now, Last.fm has had a quirky set of apps and plugins to do all this tracking and recommending, and a cool but cluttered interface for the website itself. This latest push, codenamed “Operation Depth Charge”, has made major improvements to the website's usability and given it a much more polished, fun and dare I say Web 2.0 look and feel. The Last.fm player has also gotten a major overhaul, improving it's usability and usefulness pretty dramatically.
Unfortunately the part that kind of got overlooked was the array of plugins and apps that allow you to report your offline mp3 player listening -- all but one of these, YamiPod, have been abandoned in the wake of the new upgrades and are no longer to be officially supported going forward. The jury's still out on whether I'm going to be as happy with that as I have been with the now-unsupported-by-Last.fm iScrobbler plugin, but I imagine I'll get inspired to let you all know when I've formed an opinion...
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