Correspondent Profile
Last.fm Last.fm is a service that keeps track of what music you listen to, and then produces a large number of features personalised to you.
Last.fm is the flagship product from the team that designed the Audioscrobbler music engine. More than ten million times a day, Last.fm users "scrobble" their tracks to our servers, helping to collectively build the world's largest social music platform. Last.fm taps the wisdom of the crowds, leveraging each user's musical profile to make personalised recommendations, connect users who share similar tastes, provide custom radio streams, and much more.
Founded by Felix Miller, Martin Stiksel and Richard Jones, we interviewed developers Matt Ogle and Anil Cawa Bavia for Vitamin.
Matt is a Canadian web developer who has lived in London since 2004 and currently leads Last.fm's web team. He is the creator of the Streetprint Engine, an open-source CMS for sharing and archiving printed ephemera for which he received a Masters in English Literature and Computing Science from the University of Alberta (Canada). Since joining Last.fm in early 2005, Matthew helped guide the merger of Audioscrobbler.com and Last.fm, and shaped many of the site's user-facing recommendation, communication, and music discovery features. He plays keyboards in the company band.
Anil has been developing web applications for four years. His interests took a turn towards social software while at college, where he produced a web-based social newsreader. His professional interests include user-centric software design, lightweight development practices, the future of the culture industry and the attention economy. Anil joined Last.fm in the summer of 2006.