Peter Provost and Steve Pavlina both have mentioned the Pandora Music Service which will allow you to create a customized streaming radio channel based on artists and songs that you enter into the system. I have to admit that the Pandora user interface is pretty slick, but having to enter in your favorites isn’t the best way to go. Last.FM offers the same thing as Pandora, but does a lot more. You can download a free plug-in to your music player (I use Windows Media Player), and after you create a free Last.FM account, the plug-in will publish the songs you are listening to, in real time. They create a nice user home page for you, and list what you have been listening to recently, and also keep track of your personal Charts. What’s even better, they use this data to help link you to “musical neighbors” (folks who listen to similar songs), and publish them on your page. This way, you can find people with similar tastes, and see what they have been listening to, and get ideas on new music. There are other sites that do similar stuff, but so far Last.FM has been the best one that I’ve found. Last.FM is also trying to do a MySpace type thing, and help you develop a social network, but it isn’t nearly as nice as MySpace. I’ve previously published a link to MySpace home, and here is a link to My Last.FM page. Feel free to add me as a friend.
None of these sites really contain all of what I’m looking for, in one place. Eventually I can see someone pulling these ideas all together. MySpace would seem to be the leader, but they have grown so fast that their site is notoriously down for considerable periods of time, so I don’t know if they could expand into newer areas. Sounds like an opportunity for someone to jump in and beat them at their own game (hey MSN, this is your chance to outclass Yahoo’s Launch and MySpace all in one jump).
But what I’d really like to see is not just publishing what I’m listening to to a 3rd party site, but to be able to publish it to my blog. This way I can create links from my site to Amazon using my Amazon Associates id. Well, there is a couple things that I’d like to do with that data, but linking to Amazon is just one of them. So, in my “spare” time I’m busy at work with my WILTS project (What I’m Listening To Service), and use that service to plug into CommunityServer. It gives me a chance to develop some web services using Visual Studio 2005 and WSE 3.0, and even maybe a little Windows Communication Foundation. If you are interested in helping out, let me know. I’m planning on making this an open source project, once I have something working. The most important thing (well besides actually getting it done) is to publish to message schemas, and hopefully create some sort of public standard for them, since it feels like something more then just a few people would be interested in.