This purging phenomenon however, is quite interesting and highlights some inherent problems in human relationships on social networks. Cleaning up your friends list requires you to very explicitly re-evaluate every relationship on a particular network. In our real lives we are hardly ever confronted with this. People drift in and out of our social circles and it is a very naturally occurring process. Only in very dramatic settings have I publicly declared to have broken off contact with a friend.

Part of the problem is the auto-friending that occurs on some networks (whether via a machine or personally). It leaves the floodgates open for hundreds of meaningless contacts to seep in. Subsequently, as Scoble says, the whole social network experience becomes unmanageable because the system is not capable of assessing which of these contacts are meaningful or not. What’s more, these contacts or links, never gets removed, they are always there, unless specifically removed. It is as if you are compiling an ever increasing list of people you have ever socially interacted with.

The Dunbar’s number is also very often grossly exceeded on many social networks. My personal Facebook account (231 “friends”) is one such example. But, in it’s defense, social networks aren’t exactly like our real social networks, probably exactly because of the reason’s stated above.

Competing with free isn’t easy, if possible at all. One does not need to go far to realize that it is getting increasingly harder to sell music. And despite what the recent conviction of The Pirate Bay suggests, it isn’t going to get easier.

And this is where I truly believe the difference will come in for services like spotify. If they somehow manage to trump other ways of music consumption and make people feel like that usability is worth the 10 EUR they are paying, then, and only then, will they succeed.

Consistency
Last.fm breaks one of the most important rules regarding usability and that is that they break consistency. Go to any artist page and you will notice that the “Events”, “Listeners”, “Groups”, “More Information”, “Email Newsletter” and “Recent Activity” headers are all identical. Yet, only the “Groups” and “Events” headers are clickable. This is curious, especially because the Listeners box have an option to “See more”.
Similarly, the “Top Albums”, “Shoutbox”, “Similar Artists” and “Videos” are all visually indistinguishable from each other and yet all of them, except the “Shoutbox” can be clicked.
Which one of these are clickable?

Hierarchy
Then there is the hierarchy of the video pages. When you are viewing a particular video of an artist, the focus of the hierarchy seems to be on the fact that I am on a video page. Shouldn’t it rather be the artist to which that video belongs? This is true for all the sections within an artist page. It feels like last.fm tried to merge page titles with breadcrumbs but they failed.

Where am I?
Another big mistake is the general indication of where I am within last.fm. The previous site did this quite well but on the renewed version has an identical top menu regardless of what pages you are on. And is it just my or was that search box squeezed in at the last minute?
Apart from the top menu not indicating where I am, when posting a new thread in a forum, nowhere is it indicated where I am.

Search
Search in general leaves a lot to desire. First of all, as mentioned, the search box feels a bit misplaced but more importantly, the results are hard to navigate. A search for The Knife gives us the band but it also lists all songs that The Knife has on last.fm. This means that if you are perhaps looking for the song Mack the Knife, you will be doing some serious searching through all the other The Knife songs before finding it.
Page sizes and side menu
A small annoyance is also the fact that he side menu seems to disappear on certain pages. While I understand that a side menu isn’t applicable to all pages, it seems strange that the Browse, Video, Listen and Events pages are without side menu whilst the Charts page has one. What’s more, the Event page is a different size than the rest. It doesn’t feel like an elegant solution although I must admit, this is a minor problem, if at all.
Useless eye candy
Whilst browsing by Posters on the event page is novel, it doesn’t really help me in picking an event.

Small input fields
Something that annoyed me from the start was the small input field for forum discussions. While I understand that the forums are not very high on the priority list of last.fm (which one of you can find the general discussion forum?), I do feel that the group forums are one of the core elements of last.fm and having such a small input field is not encouraging me to post. If there is a greasmonkey fix for this, let me know in the comments.

The group forum input box

Whilst on the topic of input, the three rows of buttons are slightly confusing, for instance: what is the difference between Video, Google Video and Youtube? Can’t this be merged into one?

Groups and Friends overview
These two pages are mostly the same although the group overview only shows 10 groups (without searching capabilities) whilst the friends overview page displays twice that amount. Finding a particular person or group is rather hard if you have to browse through loads of pages, showing only 10 or results per page.
The groups overview

In general however, I would like to applaud the last.fm team’s efforts. Most of these issues are easily fixed. I think the major problems are the fact that headers are inconsistent and also the fact that the menu items at the do not indicate in which section I am, making it harder to navigate through the site. Apart from that I am very excited about the brand new last.fm.
Best new feature? Definitely the library.

Business Behind Free Excerpt

In the configuration window of twhirl you have the option of posting your tweets to Jaiku and Pownce. First of all, the input fields are without labels, but I can live with that. What irritates me more though, is that using asterisks suggests that you must fill in your password for the service (this is a common idiom online). It is the case for Pownce but not for Jaiku. To get your twhirl to post to Jaiku you must in fact fill out your API key, (Jaiku users can find it here) and not your password.

So, if anyone from twhirl reads this, please fix the issue. A simple quick and dirty solution would be to pre-fill the Jaiku input field with the text “Jaiku API Key”. Better solutions are welcome in the comments.

Oh and if anyone is looking for a Jaiku invite, feel free to ask.