14 DAY TRIAL // One of the main appeals of Last.fm is all the data it keeps collecting on your music habits. For numbers and stats geeks, Last.fm is music heaven giving you access to all sorts of information you'd have no other way of keeping track of. For the hardcore Last.fm users and said stats geeks, the music site has just introduced a feature that will keep them busy for hours, personalized history graphs of their scrobbling habits.
Dubbed the Scrobbling Timeline, the feature started out as an internal project to turn all the data amassed into a customizable visual representation. Last.fm's Klaas Bosteels created the feature, partly to surprise Last.fm's veteran sysadmin.
"[I]t didn’t take me long to figure out that a great way of thanking him would be to write some code that does something we’ve been working towards for some time at Last.fm: generating personalized, real-time scrobbling history graphs. And while I was at it, I turned the code into a Playground demo that we’ve made available not only to subscribers, but to anyone who has ever scrobbled a track," Bosteels wrote.
The feature is available now in Playground, Last.fm's equivalent for Google Labs, for testing. The main graph shows the number of tracks submitted by the user over time as well as the major milestones in their scrobbling history, the 100th track, the 1000th, 10,000th and so on. This in itself is pretty interesting, you can see the slumps in music listening in periods when maybe you were on vacation or things like that.
It gets even better, though, as the graph can also be filtered to show just the tracks for any of your top artists and also compare any graph with your friends' usage. The final neat trick, you can turn any graph into a cumulative one showing how individual play-throughs added up over time. It's not going to convince anyone to start using Last.fm, but the feature is great for quite a few minutes of fun every once in a while.
