Last.fm Playground and some forms of leverage scrobblings

When I Last.fm in February 2009, I never imagined would become one of my favorite services. Currently I use it almost daily, either from the computer while I'm working or from the phone when I'm on the street.

For those unfamiliar with Last.fm , I commented quickly that this is a music recommendation service with an air of social network. To function, it "feeds" of the music we listen using a scrobbler, it is not nothing but an application installed on your computer or smart phone, which then sends information about the songs we hear, this process is called scrobbling. Simple is not it?.

The Scrobbler is available for Windows, Mac, Linux, iPhone and Android, also supports the most popular music player from each of these platforms (Winamp, iTunes, Windows Media Player, Rhythmbox, Amarok, etc). The application also works as a Last.fm radio player, where you can tune based on the recommendations made by the service.

Spotify users can enjoy the Scrobbler and recommendations directly to the player by installing the Last.fm application via Spotify apps .

Now that we know how and where to work, I will comment on what I like so much.

First of all, Last.fm is not based solely on the genre of the music we listen to give us recommendations, the service goes much further, processing each of the clues to know about these things as rhythm, harmony and timbre . Literally no science behind it, and the Last.fm team is constantly researching in order to improve the algorithms responsible for generating as exact recommendations.

On the other side, and entering the social part of the service. Last.fm allows us to meet people from around the world, but unlike other social networks, where recommendations are made ​​friendly contacts based on common musical compatibility is used, measured from the artists we have in common with the other person.

Last.fm Playground

Another reason why I like this service is the Last.fm Playground, a place where we can view certain sections of the statistics generated from our scrobbling in very curious and entertaining. We also found some "toys" with which we can be distracted for a while and at the same time help improve those algorithms that I mentioned above.

The Playground has over twenty projects, some of which require that we subscribed to enjoy them. Several of them are just prototypes and may not work or provide results that are not what you expect, but in general are very interesting.

The following are some projects that can be found on the list:

- Fast or slow?: With this project, we lend our ears to science. We just have to answer a few questions while listening to a piece of a song and help determine the tempo of it.

- Night Out: Here we have to select a city and one or more of our friends. By providing this information as a result we will obtain a list of events (concerts basically) to be held in the coming days in the city and indicated that we and the friends you select would enjoy.

- Music Universe: It allows us to view our "musical universe," where musical genres are represented by planets and their moons, which in turn come to be the artists of the genre.

Build Last.fm

In my opinion, Build Last.fm is one of the most interesting things we find, as it provides multiple ways to enhance our experience as service users. Here we see a large number of tools, extensions and applications developed by the community for everyone to enjoy.

There are literally everything from widgets for WordPress to music players, Scrobblers for different operating systems and many other things that are sure to be pleasantly surprised more than one.

What you may not know of Last.fm

• The service we enjoy today was built from two different ideas later joined. A Last.fm name, originally a radio station online, the other is Audioscrobbler, which would be the thesis of Richard Jones, a student of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, UK.
• Termination. Fm that relate directly to frequency modulation, is actually associated with the TLD of Micronesia.
• Last.fm is owned by CBS since 2007. Long before this the service went through some financial difficulties, forcing the team to improvise an office in the bedroom of Felix Miller, one of the founders. During this time, developers who had been hired only paid them with food and slept in the attic of Miller.

Through this whole world of possibilities opened Last.fm-musically-I discovered a large number of artists and bands that otherwise I am sure would not have heard before. I also met a large number of people, where I can get a handful of good friends that now keep regular contact.

And you do you have something more to tell about Last.fm?