2002: Last.fm and Audioscrobbler Herald the Social Web
Following in Amazon's footsteps, two student projects independently use 'collaborative filtering' to bring recommendations and social networking to online music; soon they will join forces.
Last.fm circa 2003; via Last.fm Flickr account.
What we now know as the “social web” — or Web 2.0 — didn’t arrive until around 2004. But the first inklings of it were emerging a couple of years before. As usual, music was the harbinger.
Last.fm was founded in 2002 by a group of four Austrian and German students from Ravensbourne College of Design and Communication in London. It was fashioned as an internet radio station that allowed a user to build a listening profile and share it with others. The year of its launch, Last.fm won a young talent award at the Europrix, a multimedia awards show based in Vienna. This was how the product was described in a showcase video (embedded below) leading up to the awards ceremony:
“After repeated use, the system builds a listening profile that increasingly reflects the user's preferences. The sum of all profiles is visualized in the ‘Map of Music,’ a presentation of musical connections and genres determined only by the collaborative effort of Last.fm users.”
Last.fm showcase, 2002
When the students went up to receive their award, one of them, Thomas Willomitzer, noted the importance of “collaborative filtering” to the Last.fm system. The idea was that the Last.fm algorithm would recommend music you might like, based on your listening history combined with the listening history of other, similar, users. Willomitzer added that this type of algorithm would be familiar to people who used Amazon.com.
Here's a video of the Last.fm founders presenting at Europrix 2002, via Thomas Willomitzer:
Last.fm presentation at Europrix, 2002
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