fredag 25 Jul 2008, 20:40

Now, there's been a lot of points on either side of the new Last.fm design. Personally, I think it both has its advantages and drawbacks. I think the users causing an uproar to "bring back the old design" need to get over themselves. There will always be someone (or in this case, 10,000 something users…) who doesn't like change. And quite frankly, the old last.fm design was great, in usefulness and look.

However, with this new design, which we'll just have to learn to get used to, come many new, exciting innovations. I know this sounds like a shilling, but I'm just a regular user giving my NOK 0,20,- on the situation.

First up, let's check out the new additions with this new Last.fm. First off, there's the "library", an ingenious function which the previous Last.fm lacked. You can see through EVERYTHING you've ever scrobbled/tagged/eaten with a nice side of bacon - every song by every artist. I was very upset when the Tag+Profile editor was removed, as it was very useful to remove mistagged objects from the library. So, naturally, since it worked pretty well and without bugs, I didn't understand, nor did I get any answer from Last.fm staff about how and why it was removed. However, Last.fm have paid back our waiting in dividends, with the new, user-friendly library.

Going through everything you've ever scrobbled is kick ass. Finally I can remove those travesties I didst scrobble once upon a time, before I realized that mistagging songs and artists didn't help Last.fm. Artists like "Kill Bill Vol.1", "Nintendo GameCube" and "KEYSER SOZES ORCHESTRA" (thanks a lot, file sharing programs!) performing songs like "01 - Kill Bill Vol.1 - Twitted Nerve" and "13, Kaizers Orchestra - Maestro - Knekker Deg Til Sist (Live at Luftslottet)". DAMN, it feels good removing all that crap.

Now on to the bad parts. For instance, the profile has been mucked up terribly. The info section is on the RIGHT side, and there's no way to align the text to the right side. Additionally, placing the shoutbox WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY down on the page, I didn't like. All in all, the new profile page looks bloated, and a lot of space could be better used. The old one was good, and everything you'd want to check up on (Shoutbox messages, groups) could be seen the instant you loaded the profile. I don't like all this waste of time with navigating ALL THE WAY DOWN. The last thing, the "recent journals" section, complete with number of comments is missing. You have to go to the journals page to even see them! I'm not gonna bother to do that, so when do I know when I get comments?
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Well, those are my thoughts. In time, we'll all get used to it, and happier we'll be. Last.fm could still leave the old design as an "alternative" skin for those who won't embrace the future.