#19

I've been a Last.fm user since 2008, constantly toggling back and forth between this music streaming site and Pandora.  These have both been serviceable tools for me at my old job or when working around the house while needing some tunes in the background.  I hadn't previously thought of these as social networking tools, although I had linked Pandora to my Facebook account for a time, allowing friends who cared to see what I'd been listening to, or "liking," etc.  This is not something I kept up with as I mostly viewed it as inconsequential (although I should note that one of my wife's best friends had apparently listened to my station and picked up on a lot of new artists she hadn't previously been into, so that was cool -- and the one and only time I'm aware of such a thing happening!).

For the sake of this task, I decided to explore my Last account in a bit more detail.  Last functions in much the same way that Pandora does (allowing users to customize their listening experience by inputting a song or an artist's name, and subsequently "loving" or "liking" songs played that have similar quantifiable qualities to the original), but I have no idea of the similarities and differences -- nor are they important here -- in the programming that goes behind these respective personalized music services.  Like other social networking sites (on their main profile page), users can view their recent activity (songs "loved," friends made, stations shared); beyond that similarity, however, the site unsurprisingly gets pretty music specific!  You can view artists saved to your library, recently listened to tracks, and running play count. Top artists, top songs, and number of plays per artist/song are another cool detail.  If you dig a little deeper into your library, you can even see a list of every song you've listened to complete with date/time stamp to satisfy your inner nerd's thirst for details!  Other features include: artist bios, links to purchase tracks/albums, and tagging ability.

The social connectivity aspect of Last is what I hadn't really previously explored.  I hadn't a single "friend" on the site prior to yesterday, when I added a friend who I just happened to know also had a Last account.  Upon us becoming friends in the Last universe, I unsurprisingly found my musical compatibility with him to be "VERY HIGH"!  (I would imagine this to be the case with most of my real-life friends, though it would be interesting to see how compatibility is rated with someone with different tastes.)  Like other social networking sites, one can join groups, see neighbors, and view lists of events (concerts/shows).  I've always been a bit of a loner when it comes to attending live shows (so I'm not sure how useful these features would be to me), but if one were a bit heavy with the tech hand and looking to meet up with others with a common music bond, I can see how these tools would be very handy.  As useful as these qualities are, I think most folks probably do not utilize them much here.  There are so many ways to share so many different things, I think the main problem is that it doesn't occur for people to try sharing via a different medium when others that they have used are perfectly serviceable in accomplishing the task at hand.  Last.fm's features are nifty (and worth playing around with occasionally), but ultimately kind of inconsequential in the land of Facebook and so many other social media sites.