Last.fm turned 20 years old over the weekend and users are still tracking their music playback hundreds of thousands of times a day. The Verge's Jacob Kastrenakes writes: Last.fm felt just a little bit revolutionary when it was first introduced in the early 2000s. The site's plug-ins -- which were originally created for a different service called Audioscrobbler -- tapped into your music player, took note of everything you listened to, and then displayed all kinds of statistics about your listening habits. Plus, it could recommend tracks and artists to you based on what other people with similar listening habits were interested in. "If this catches on, a system like this would be a really effective way to discover new artists and find people with similar tastes," the blogger Andy Baio wrote in February 2003 after first trying it out. This was very much a precursor to the algorithmic recommendation systems that are built into every music streaming service today. Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal -- whatever it is you're listening to, they're all tracking your habits and using that to recommend new tracks to you. But on those services, your data is kept hidden behind the scenes. Using Last.fm was like having access to your year-end Spotify Wrapped but available every single day and always updating. Streaming services' automated recommendations have largely obviated the need for a platform like Last.fm (I certainly haven't scrobbled anything in more than a decade). But I poked around, and it turns out there are still corners of the internet building vibrant communities around its features. One of the big uses is on Discord, where third-party developers have built a service called .fmbot that integrates scrobbling data into the popular chat room app. Thom, a backend developer based in the Netherlands, says the bot has more than 400,000 total users, with 40,000 people engaging with the service each day. It's particularly popular in Discords based around specific musical artists or genres -- where people "want to compare their statistics to each other" -- and among servers for small friend groups, so they can "dive deeper into what everyone is listening to," he says. The bot pulls in fun stats that people can brag about: the date of when they first listened to a given song, just how many days' worth of music they consumed each year, or a list of their top albums. In 2008, we ran a story from Slashdot reader Rob Spengler about Last.fm's "mountain of data." Not only did he note how Last.fm was the "largest online radio outlet" at the time, surpassing Pandora and others, but he (hilariously, in hindsight) posed the question: "Does sitting on a mountain of data make Last.FM powerful enough to start making a stand against the record industry?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

LINEはデータ移行を行うために準備をする必要があり、十分に準備ができていないと正しくデータが引き継げない場合があります。今回はLINEの引き継ぎ機能である「かんたん引き継ぎQRコード」と、引き継ぎ機能を使うために必要な準備を解説します。正しい手順を踏まないと、トーク履歴が消えてしまうので注意しましょう。

イーロン・マスク氏による買収後にTwitterのユーザー数が史上最高に達した一方で、分散型ソーシャルネットワークであるMastodonも月間アクティブユーザー数が史上初めて100万人を突破したことが明らかになっています。TwitterユーザーでMastodonも使ってみたいと考える人向けに、Twitter上で「あなたがフォローしている人」をMastodonでも見つけてくれるサービス「Twitodon」が登場しました。

続きを読む...

NTTは超低遅延の100Gbps専用線サービス「IOWN（アイオン:Innovative Optical and Wireless Network）」初の商用サービスである「IOWN 1.0」を2023年3月に提供開始すると発表した（クラウド Watch、日経クロステック、産経新聞）。

IOWNでは光回線の200分の1の低遅延を実現。ユーザーがエンド・エンドで光波長を占有できる。主に法人顧客向けに提供し、遠隔手術やeスポーツなどでの活用を想定しているという。発表の場では今後のロードマップについても説明がおこなわれた。2025年に開催される大阪・関西万博で「IOWN 2.0」の商用化を発表、2030年以降に「IOWN 4.0」として、電力効率が100倍、大容量化が125倍、遅延が200分の1をクリアする目標も掲げている。

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関連ストーリー：
NTTなどによる2030年までの光半導体量産実現に向けた「IWON」、65社が参加を検討 2019年11月18日