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Millions of us adore last.fm. Why aren't Google, Amazon & Apple trying to copy it?

I'm one of the many people who love last.fm. I love getting a view of my listening habits over the course of years, and I love being able to see what my friends have liked and have been listening to lately. There are things about last.fm that I would like to see changed/added, but it's a great site for music sharing.

And in the days when it was active, I found that the wall page on Lala to be extremely useful: seeing what friends of mine had listened to and liked.

Lala and last.fm got so close to creating the perfect simple music sharing site. Why is it so hard for Google, Apple and Amazon--companies with more than enough resources to finish the job--to give us something great?

What people want from a social music site:
  • To be able to share what their music statistics are (like last.fm)
  • To be able to see what their friends are listening to and liking
What I'd love to see is a Facebook-wall type page that can either show only the songs that your friends have liked or show you a constantly updating stream of what your friends are currently listening to. I think that would be extremely addictive.

But the simple would be easy to implement. So why hasn't anyone done it? Apple even bought Lala and would have easy access to people's iTunes XML files and yet still failed mightily with Ping. Maybe Google has something up their sleeve for Google Music and Plus, but how tough would it be to, say, have your thumbs up tracks show up in Buzz? Or be able to put what you're listening to now in Google Music on your profile page?

It's too simple of an idea for it not to be done better already.
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