Posts Tagged ‘set-top box’

last.fm for television

Wednesday, January 6th, 2010

One of the social network sites I’ve been using the longest is last.fm.

(If you know what last.fm is, bear with me teaching you to suck eggs for a few paragraphs… it gets more interesting – honest!)

The idea of last.fm is that a background service captures (or “scrobbles“) the music that I listen to on my computer at home, on the mp3 player that I use in the car, and on my laptop in the office.

This means that I now have a large record detailing the music I’ve listened to over the last three years.

I do this for a few reasons, including:

  • The data is made available to me through a rich API, which means I’m free to play with it, as well as take advantage of the creations of others, such as the wonderful visualisations generated by lastgraph
  • I can see what my friends listen to, which is interesting, as well as being a good way to come across new music
  • last.fm use this detailed history of my music-listening tastes to make automated recommendations of other music that I might like

This is all a long-winded way of saying that I like last.fm. I find it useful and interesting, and want the same for all the media that I consume – not just music.

I went looking for an equivalent for the books that I read in August 2008, and started using goodreads.

But what about the television that I watch? Could I create a last.fm-style scrobbler to capture what I watch on television? And then try and come up with a few examples of how I could share and visualise the data?

This question is where I started at Christmas… and after a few evenings of hacking some Python together, I’ve come up with:

last.fm for television

Please go take a look. (needs Flash – sorry)

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