A number of FriendFeeders complained that Last.fm was showing up too often in their feeds because we tracked every song you listened to. We updated our service so that we will only publish the songs you explicitly marked as "loved" in Last.fm. We hope this will make the Last.fm entries more useful and a bit less frequent.
22 comments:
this is a big problem.
i had the same issue with tumblr which led to removing last.fm
what's needed is a algorithm that looks at the songs you've listened to more than 5x in the past week or 10x in the past month (or frankly whatever frequency you decide) and limits only them to the feed.
implicit data is a better way to do "loved" than requiring someone to explicitly say they love it.
i tried to build that in yahoo pipes with my last.fm feed but couldn't get it done.
fred
Fred: great points. For FriendFeed, 99% of our services are connected to "sharing" functions (sharing on Google Reader, favoriting on YouTube, etc), so connecting to Last.fm Loved Songs makes the most sense, as it is the closest thing to "sharing" on Last.fm. Doing something more magical with song popularity is very interesting, though, and something we should try in the future.
I agree with Fred. I really want FriendFeed (and Last.fm for that matter) to be passive, and I know I never explicitly "love" songs on Last.fm but I do scrobble most of my listening. I'd rather the consumer (e.g. you guys ;-) apply an algorithm to determine what I'm listening to a lot.
I agree with these comments - many users scrobble on last.fm but don't user the player or plugin in order to mark "loved" songs (some may find this distracting).
omg u guys r weird
Wow! great blog lol!
Brett -
And here the last few days I wondered if there was a bug in Friendfeed because last.fm data wasn't showing up. Bummer.
Put me in the apparently small, but vocal group, that would have liked to have seen a filter added instead of only the "love this" songs added. I'm probably not going to take the time to right click on the songs I love just so they show up in my friendfeed. I know it's only a one time deal, but ... well it's pretty low on the priority scale.
Keep in mind that some of us are using FF as an "activity tracker" and having the info there of the activity is useful to us. Filtering features would give our friends or followers the ability to filter out what they consider to be noise.
Is it really that hard (doubtful) for you guys to add filtering features?
With the last.fm "love this" change you just made FriendFeed less useful to at least one user (me). For a more detailed description of what I mean of using FF as an activity tracker, see this post I wrote about it:
http://www.makeyougohmm.com/20071003/4840/
In short, please add filtering functions. The "love this" last.fm change is a DOWNgrade, not an upgrade from my perspective. Hopefully this is a short term hole plug.
And, slightly unrelated, for whatever reason, I've been unable to add my Google Reader shared URL. FF just keeps returning that it is not a valid URL even though I can visit it just fine in the browser.
We hear you all... We will definitely come up with a better way to handle last.fm and similar services in the future, and we agree with all of your comments.
wow...
your blog is
amazing;;
keep it up :]
Thats great, I agree with fred
implicit data is a better way to do "loved" than requiring someone to explicitly say they love it.
I'd prefer to announce all the songs I'm listening... Maybe because no1 is following me right now :P.
But it'd be great to be able to configure the Last.fm feed showing in FriendFeed (some people prefer all the songs, other loved and third want the songs that they listen to repeatedly). Why not provide them all the options?
Nothing new ?
Same as Dmitri - let us choose what we want to publish in our feed and let the subscriber choose what he wants to see rather than trying to guess in the middle - this is going to be suboptimal in any case.
I agree, I scrobble 99% of the music on my last.fm feed and was hoping these would show up in friendfeed.
Maybe aggregate by the hour? user listened to the following this past hour? Or let us chose whether we want all songs or "loved" songs
No one thought to grab the last 5 songs played or grab the songs every few hours? The "loved" thing is silly. Who the hell tags every second?
Plaxo pulse does this very well with a weekly top artists summary (see this example: http://venturebeat.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/08/plaxo-three.jpg); I'd like to see something similar on friendfeed.
Thanks. Posting each and every song was like spam in my feed. However, the weekly top artist (like Plaxo Pulse) would be good too.
Also, it seems events (like concerts) I'm going are not shown in my friendfeed feed. Is this normal?
I want to post EVERY song I listen so I must use a sw that write in my gtalk status the track, artist and album ...
If someone don't want to see that can hide my gtalk status but if you write in the feed every songs from last.fm someone can hide only the last.fm feed ...
There is a way to post every song you listen to FriendFeed...
Just add your "Recently Played Tracks" Last.fm RSS feed to FriendFeed like a blog ;-)
Are you guys any closer to resolving this? I'd prefer to be able to show all the tracks I'm listening to or at very least a filter to show my top artists over a given time period or weekly charts etc? With last.fm's recent upgrade there are a load more filters for displaying listening habits and giving the option only to show 'loved tracks' on FF is a little lame. I'll stop moaning now, thanks for listening :)
I'd also prefer some other option besides "most loved." I don't think I've ever tagged anything as such. I'd prefer (and I realize I'm probably in the minority here) to just post one message per album or even just the pictures of all the albums listened to that day, once a day. I listen to albums--not songs. If anyone has any suggestions how to do that without last.fm, even better.
Hrrm, is this thing on?
I would like to see something besides loved tracks since I never use that feature (I scrobble through iTunes and Spotify).
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