Battleangel

The social music platform Last.fm has had a major overhaul. The new ajax laden interface had me discouraged for a few minutes until I saw how much they had done to improve music recommendations and the library feature. It is also much easier to see what is moving and shaking in the world of music now using the site. The use of graphics and images is a lot better also, and works with the site rather than against it. The new inline music player and real-time chart updates are also very appealing. Suddenly, browsing for new music is actually a lot of fun.

It is true that the site now has an uncanny resemblance to Facebook, but the airy simplicity of the new design is just so much better than the previous look. If there ought to be a call to bring back the old design it should be the design it had when I first joined back in February 2006.

I also like that they removed the "neighbours" display from the profile page and gave it its own sub-page. Neighbourhood was a real waste of space that no one ever used.

The ad placement is a little ugly though, and a lot of the ads were flash-based, but that is actually an advantage when you use an adblocker. Ads that are too well integrated tend to give nasty formatting issues when removed.

Now if they could only speed up the site.