bijan:

Right now, Last.fm does a great job keeping track of my music playback history with their scrobbler. It works across multiple third party services and that data is pure gold. But there isn’t a timeline. The logged in home page doesn’t look social even though there is a lot of social stuff built into the guts of the service like friends and neighborhood radio.

Actually, Last.fm does have a timeline—their “Friends Listening Now” page. I know this because I’m one of those insufferable music snobs who disdain automatic music recommendation services, and for years literally the only reason I used Last.fm was to see the timeline of what my friends were listening to. Unfortunately, as the years have gone by, Last.fm has deemphasized this feature to the point where it seems like an afterthought and redesigned it so it feels less like a live timeline and more like a static friends list.

This is a shame, because I think Bijan is dead on with his hunch that the timeline is central to creating a truly compelling music social network. As I’ve mentioned before on this blog, I’ve always felt that there is more value to implicit recommendations like the ones my friends would unknowingly make through their mundane workday listening habits than in explicit ones like the kind Last.fm’s algorithms would serve up. I had my own idea years ago, inspired by some ad-hoc podcasting experiments I did with Delicious, for a simple, timeline-based music network where anyone could pull songs from other peoples’ streams into their own ongoing stream (not unlike reblogging on Tumblr). Too bad music technology is such a notoriously difficult area to innovate in.