akrish

Last.fm, a London based company that started a couple of years ago (I think), has pretty much revolutionized music for a lot of youngsters. Their website is essentially a social networking web application organized around music and the music people listen to.

Last.fm records and stores information about all the music that you listen to on your computer or portable music device and makes that information available online to other users. They use pretty interesting software to interface with a variety of media libraries and devices, and they’re constantly extending to support others. The “last.fm” application interfaces with your last.fm account and encompasses all of the “scrobbling” (collecting of song data). It also allows the user to listen to tailored radio stations that play only the music that the user is looking for. I’ve found that their radio stations work just as well as Pandora.

On top of all these interesting music features, their website provides all the standard social networking stuff. They have hundreds (maybe thousands) of groups, forums, messaging, public posting, profiles, blogging, and pretty much everything you could want in a social networking website. What’s interesting is that I think they’ve really thought through the social networking side of things and done it really well (at least a lot better than myspace). You don’t see a lot of flaming in discussion threads, and there’s very little vulgar content, but they still do a great job of connecting people with each other. They’ve clearly done something right on the social networking side of things.

I’ve read a couple of articles about social networking, and I know some of the common pitfalls and whatnot, but I haven’t been able to figure out how Last.fm works so nicely. Almost all content is universally readable and writable, and their user base is mostly teenagers who are usually the problem demography in social networks. What’s more, they don’t have any noticeable moderation of content. Everything seems to just work.

Moving away from the technical side of things, Last.fm really has some useful tools. They provide event listings (mostly concerts) that allow users to physically meet each other and socialize. They also have a really useful “related artist” feature that lists other artists that are musically similar to a given artist. I almost always use this feature to browse for new music that I may want to get. There are a lot more interesting things that Last.fm offers, but I can’t say I’m a very active user (apart from listening to a lot of music), so I don’t really know much about them.

I’ve used Last.fm for a couple of years now, and I’ve watched them grow steadily, adding features and increasing membership. They’ve done a good job, adding features that relate to their core goal rather than expanding into other sectors (which I think a lot of growing companies tend to do). All this time, they’ve been very successful. I highly recommend their service to anyone who listens to a lot of music.

Everyone knows about Facebook. It’s a great social utility, and probably the most popular online social networking site out there. Almost all college-going students in the United States have accounts, and the craze is spreading to high schoolers, and even to adults (although slowly). Yet, the company may not have such a promising future. Ever since the opening of the so-called “Facebook Platform” to third party developers, the site has severely deteriorated and unless some changes are made, Facebook may start losing out to competing social networking sites.

“Facebook Platform” is essentially an API along with a way for developers to embed and integrate their applications into Facebook. It sounds great in theory; it allows other developers to capitalize on Facebook’s massive user base and it adds value to Facebook itself, by adding more cool features for their users. Unfortunately, it isn’t that simple. Now, the site runs incredibly slowly, and many of the pages are too cluttered with third-party garbage for me to find what I’m looking for. It seems like Facebook would have been much better off without opening their website to other developers and instead just adding some more features of their own.

The thing that made Facebook so cool was its ease of use, but they seem to have lost some of that appeal. Nowadays, when I visit my friend’s profile pages to write something on their wall, it takes at least 15 seconds to fully load their page. The problem is that when I load someones page, I have to gather data from all of these different servers hosting the different applications, and this really slows things down. After that, I still have to scroll past all of their applications to get to their wall wasting even more of my time. Compare this to before, when people’s profile pages loaded almost instantaneously and weren’t filled with applications, and the old Facebook seems to be a lot better, at least in the “ease of use” sense. Ultimately, these two problems caused by the “Facebook Platform” are really taking away from the user experience on the site.

Although I don’t use any of the third-party apps, some of them are pretty cool I and can see why people like to have them. However, this doesn’t mean Facebook should compromise their performance just to allow them. I think they should have kept the site closed to external developers and just developed some of the cool apps internally. First off, this would really improve page load times because all apps would be requesting data from Facebook’s servers. Secondly, this would remove a lot of the garbage on pages because apps could be combined or better integrated. Since Facebook has more control than third-party developers, they are able to combine applications and present them a lot better than external developers can. Another option would be to have a thorough screening process of third-party applications. They can then restrict apps that take away from overall presentation of pages. Either approach probably would have worked better for Facebook in the long run, but the current “open” attitude doesn’t seem like it’ll work out.

I have a Facebook account, but have been using it less and less since the “opening.” I know there are other users that are annoyed with the latency and the ridiculously cluttered pages, but most people continue to use it. Maybe Facebook has such a monopoly on college student networking tools that it doesn’t really matter how bad the site is right now, but sooner or later someone is gonna design a networking site that looks a lot more like the old Facebook and I think they’ll beat out Facebook in the long run. It may end up being a trend with social networking utilities to be really good early on, but they slowly deteriorate after they’ve won over a large user base. It happened with myspace (which is now pretty terrible by the way) and it looks like it’s happening with Facebook.

Edited: August 12, 2007: Marc Andreessen wrote an article about the Facebook Platform soon after the platform was release. His opinion slightly differs from mine but he does mention the latency issues. Read it here.