Web 3.0 and LastFM

This week in class we continued our discussion of Web 2.0 from last week, and briefly touch on Web 3.0. For this week’s blog, I wanted to look more into web 3.0, and get a better idea of what the future holds for the Internet.

After doing some research online I found that Web 3.0 will be an “intelligent” and “omnipresent” web that continuously learns from its users in order to anticipate its users likes and dislikes. One website that kept coming up in my searches was LastFM, a music website that recommends music to its users by taking the music that they like, and finding new music for them that other users with similar musical tastes enjoy. This exposes the user to new music, while allowing them to contributed to the database themselves.

I decided to check out LastFM for myself, and see if it really was as great as everyone claimed. After creating an account and adding several bands that I like to my profile I was set up and ready to go. LastFM immediately had a list of recommended artists for me to listen to, many of which I was unfamiliar with. I decided to start off by listening to the station of a band I already knew and liked. Their station did not solely play music from that band, but rather played music that was popular among other fans of the band, which exposed me to a lot of talented artists I had never heard before.

After listening to the first station for a while, I wanted to look more into some of the new bands I had discovered, so I checked out some of their artist pages. On these pages the user can choose and listen to songs by that particular artist, and then add them to their own playlist if they enjoy it. The website also contains stations based on music genres that play songs that have been tagged with that genre by other users.

The user is allowed to like or dislike any song that is played, and tag the tracks with genres. As time goes on, the users profile is more and more geared towards the music that they like, and the site gains a better understanding of the type of music it should recommend for the particular user. This database is completely determined by other users, and is constantly being changed and added too.

I feel that LastFM uses the web in a way that is smart and innovative, as its system allows the website's users to generate the information within the database, which in turn benefits every user by allowing the site to make better music recommendations. I feel that this is the direction the Internet is headed with Web 3.0, and I'm personally very excited to witness more websites that utilize this kind of system in the future.