Good news. The official last.fm client really is as bloated as people say.
iTunes
Figuring out the algorithm iTunes uses to determine which song to play next.
No more need to switch to the player to give songs the correct amount of stars.
The bit about community seeking approval from Apple is a straw man: the community wanted input, and everyone (including Apple) would have been better off with it.
Kottke and Waxy.org actually missed the point of the story, which was that software is not social.
Andrew Sullivan: “There were little white wires hanging down from their ears, or tucked into pockets, purses or jackets. The eyes were a little vacant. Each was in his or her own musical world, walking to their soundtrack, stars in their own music video, almost oblivious to the world around them. These are the iPod people.”
al3x after chatting with a girl via iTunes library titles: “And then: sorry gotta go. The girl in corner with dark hair packs up and bustles the hell out of there, probably afraid I'd just have to talk to her. Don't call it social technology.”
Chris Anderson: “Both the channel-centric reality of TV and its ephemeral nature are artifacts of the distribution bottleneck of cable broadcast. TV is still in the era of limited shelf space, while the lesson of the Long Tail is that more is always better. The growth of cable capacity over the past decade pales next to the growth in video creation over the same period and the size of the potential microaudiences for anything and everything. TiVo may have helped by at least taking the tyranny of time out of the equation, but we are nowhere near the iTunes model of being able to download everything ever made, anytime.”
