Last.FM

It's no secret: ad-supported streaming music, held up as an alternative to both paid downloads and free-for-all piracy, has hit some twists and snags. A number of well-funded start-ups, like SpiralFrog, dove into the space and few have emerged intact. Only one, Imeem, can really claim to be a success--it has licensing deals with all four major music labels--but it's still been criticized for a tepid user experience.

So it was a bit of a surprise when CBS' big announcement about Last.fm, the music-based social network it purchased last year, was the launch of a free, ad-supported … Read more

CBS has alerted media that on Wednesday morning, the company will be announcing "a new unprecedented service" involving social music service Last.fm, which it purchased last year. On hand will be Leslie Moonves, president and CEO of the CBS Corp.; Quincy Smith, president of the CBS Interactive division; as well as Felix Miller and Martin Stixsel, two of Last.fm's three co-founders.

So what is this "new unprecedented service?" PaidContent says it's hearing that CBS plans to use Last.fm's social recommendation engine (its "scrobbling" technology) and apply it to … Read more

When I first read about Jango in an alumni update from my alma mater (go Ephs), my first thought was "how many more streaming online music services does the world need?" We've already got Last.fm, Pandora, Slacker, iLike, Imeem, Ezmo...can I stop now?

But Jango offers a refreshingly clear and simple take on the theme. As with many of these services, you start by entering a favorite artist's name...and a song starts playing. You don't need to sign in, download any software, invite friends, choose other favorite artists, or let anything connect … Read more

The launch of Google's OpenSocial platform earlier this month might have been more PR than anything, as many of the third-party partners implementing the new developer standard won't be releasing anything for months.

Instead, OpenSocial-related announcements have been rolling out slowly: one of the latest is that social music site Last.fm has created OpenSocial widgets designed for use on Ning, a site that allows any person or business to create a specialized social network. (According to Ning, more than 123,000 networks have been created so far.)

Ning network creators and members can now install the Last.… Read more

A new social-networking DIY Internet radio site called Jango went into public beta on Monday.

Jango, which Webware reviewed while it was still in private testing, offers many of the common features other leading music sites offer, but embeds the controls right within the main play bar.

The site concentrates on improving the usability and interface for DIY music sites that can sometime be daunting. Things like weighting the worth of a song, scrolling your own and others' playlists, finding band information, and managing music is all one click, mouse movement, or thumbnail away from the main play bar.

What … Read more

Webware is always happy to see new competitors challenge the status quo.

Jango attempts to combine Pandora's simple interface, Finetune's control over playlists, Facebook's ease with profiles, and the music community of Last.fm.

While this latest DIY Internet radio Web site doesn't open to public beta until November 12, we're sharing it with you now. It adds nice social-networking features in a simplistic way that others just don't have yet. (We've also managed to get some early invites to Jango for CNET readers before the site officially goes public.)

"What we … Read more

If you're a Trillian Astra alpha tester, the newest build launched this weekend now has a clean and simple profile building tool. You can add a slew of Web services to your personal profile for others to see, including Facebook, Flickr, MySpace, Last.fm, and even your LinkedIn account. There are 13 in all, along with quick links to add your blog or personal Web site. The result is effectively a pretty looking link dump to all your online personas and services that others will see when they look at your profile. More importantly, however, it's the beginning … Read more

Amnesty Hypercube is a small application for Windows XP, Vista, and Mac OS X that will help you pull bits of Web content to use as widgets. These widgets can be brought up or dismissed ad hoc, or added to your desktop as a permanent fixture. Besides its cool name (second only to flux capacitor), the service is not so different from many existing widget platforms, like Yahoo Widgets, OS X's Dashboard, or the Windows Vista sidebar. Yet the company is taking a slightly different approach, one a little closer to Yourminis, which uses Adobe Integrated Runtime to run widgets on your desktop.… Read more

In Seattle, there's a classic rock station, KZOK, that's been around forever. It was already old when I discovered it in junior high school in the early 1980s, and of all the music stations in Seattle, it's the only one that still has exactly the same format. I mean, the playlist yesterday is exactly the same as the playlist in 1982, although they might stick in a song by an artist that used to be known as "new wave" (U2, Talking Heads, Pretenders), or a band that didn't exist in 1982 (Guns and Roses), … Read more