Spy on your friends' guilty pleasures

Sick of Friendster? Bored of MySpace? There's a new social networking site in town, and it's got a twist that will keep even the most jaded of Internet users interested--at least for a time.

Audioscrobbler.com is an online social network that rolls the concepts of Friendster and iTunes into one. Like Friendster or MySpace.com, users create profiles and make networks of friends by linking themselves to others. The fun part comes with no more effort than that. Audioscrobbler uses a plug-in to a computer's music player to track what songs a user is listening to. So at the end of the day, you can check to see what your friends have listened to most, ranked by most recently played, most-played artists and most-played tracks.

Users can also join groups that are created for people who have similar tastes in music. Groups can be left open for anyone to join, or the group's creator can control who's allowed in.

Really, the ways in which Audioscrobbler can introduce you to new music are endless. Through the "Explore Music" feature, you can type in the name of a band you like and it will return 100 bands that other fans of your search also listen to. From a friend's profile, click on a band you've never heard of and Audioscrobbler will show you user groups who like that band, the most popular songs played by that band, and the 20 users who listen to the band the most.

Given that, it seems that Audioscrobbler is ripe for forging relationships with music labels or online music stores. When tooling around the site, I was surprised at the lack of a "Buy it now" button attached to each artist or song title--though I'm sure that day will come.

The interface of the site is still pretty clunky, but for music fans who are always on the hunt for new musicians to explore, this is a great place to start. And of course it's always fun to peek at the music your friends are listening to day-to-day--that is until you find out one of them has listened to Kelly Clarkson's newest single 10 times this week. Then it becomes--shall we say--disconcerting.