I ♥ Last.fm

I've been shifting my home entertainment from TV to the Web. It makes me sometimes feel like I'm back to the days of Marconi and Farnsworth as far as maturity is concerned, but that's for another post. For now, I just want to congratulate Last.fm on the excellent job they've been doing at creating an enjoyable experience that traditional one-way radio will never achieve (unless it starts using the Internet).

The key to using Last.fm is to register an account and to feed your account's library with your favourite artists and albums. What Last.fm does is to create a continuous stream of tracks that either come from the library or from related artists that you did not specify. In my experience, the more I fed my library, the better - more diverse and interesting to my taste - came the results. I can now listen to a 2-hour long stream of music, without wishing once to skip a track. And if you really hate a song out of this selection, you can always ban it forever. This is precisely what I would call interactive radio. Epic success from Last.fm there.

My only gripe is that its browser-based interface doesn't translate well to form factors other than computers: mobiles and TV are a pain to use with it. Luckily, Last.fm features a good programmable API and many mashups have been created.