I read about this 'net radio service on Liz Lawley's blog,
She broadened the nature of the riff to include the social computing aspect, "...systems where the communication is implicit, where the social component is the emergent information that comes from multiple users...". Last FM provides a listening experience that, frankly, blows satellite radio out of the sky. The aural application of a concept that Peter Merholz mentioned in his article about meta-tagging by the masses. A similar conceptualization of socially engineered selection is put to effective use in the Snap search engine. Thousands of users input data about data by just going about their business as usual. The ramifications are exciting. The painpoints of indexing (controlled vocabularies, metatags, and thesauri) have a new champion, an accupuncturist whose needle is an amorphous network of machine enabled end-users.
Think about A9.com, they capture search terms and bookmarks from hundreds of thousands of folk. How long before the clever minions at Amazon draw the dashed line between search term and "best" match that all those users have selected. It's all there on one server, waiting to be culled.
This is my only New Year's prognostication: A9 will be the next big thing in social networking.
Oh, and BTW Last FM is the BOMB
