Harsh criticism on the Last.fm blog, seems most people aren’t happy w/ the new design. Bold of Last.fm to make this change so severe? More like dumb. If I was running the show there, I would not have flushed so much effort/energy down the toilet by removing the old design. Whenever you have ideas for massive changes, build a new site. You put x hours into site a, you have traffic, you have users, you’re linked, etc. Then don’t go and throw those x hours away by starting over from scratch. But CBS is new to the Internet game, they haven’t figured it out.
They should have spun this off as first.fm, or some new name. They could pull from the same database, or pull parts of the old database if people wanted to reset their listening history.
From the comments, this new design is not popular. Me, I think this new design better communicates what Last.fm is about. I remember showing the old Last.fm to a friend and I remember it was difficult to explain the Last.fm concept to her, and the design wasn’t helping. Now I haven’t studied this new design in depth, I could end up changing my mind, but so far so good.
Recommendations:
I can’t find “paste your taste”. It was very useful. I don’t want Flash widgets, I hate them. Most of the time I have Flash disabled. So bring back “paste your taste”.
The charts are too long, which means they are slow even on a fast connection in the early morning. It’s fine to show me what I listened to a year ago, two years ago, but I don’t need to see the 100th most popular song that I listened to a year ago. Show me a top 20, anything more than that is just noise. And it’s not like you need more content for the search engines to munch on, assuming it’s optimized at all.
The profile panels, give us “x” buttons so we can turn off the parts we don’t want. There doesn’t seem to be a way to edit Recent Activity.
The “library” is confusing. What’s the difference between a “loved” track and what’s in my library? The Last.fm library looks more like an extensive listing of every song I’ve banned. We have charts, we have loved tracks, enough already. And it’s not like we’re reading anything in this “library” anyway, I don’t see the analogy. And don’t default to Overall. It’s the new stuff we’re excited about.
Put less emphasis on old listening. I listened to that old track a hundred times three years ago, but don’t remind me over and over again, month after month. People change, don’t dwell on old data too much.
Remove “nofollow” in About Me. Throw me a bone here.