social media

From the Last.fm forums:

I took a look in the iTunes log and it says exactly why it doesn’t scrobble: I had MobileScrobbler installed. That’s true, when my iPod was jailbroken. However, I restored my iPod so that it’s not jailbroken anymore, but MobileScrobbler doesn’t do his job anymore and now Last.FM won’t either.

I also had a jailbroken iPod which I restored two weeks ago so I could be ready for the new v2.0 software. But since I’m running stock v1.1.4 now, this shouldn’t be happening. But there it is: “Mobile Scrobbler detected on iPod Touch - client scrobbling not needed.”

This highlights a fundamental problem I’ve seen with Audioscrobbler from the very beginning: in their quest to prevent spam, they prevent data from getting into their system in the first place, instead of storing the data and applying spam filtering on what was received.

Imagine if instead of Gmail putting spam in a spam folder it simply rejected the message in the first place — sure, it works great in general, but it sucks for all those false positives, right? As a result this site has never worked for anything but the core use-case: someone who listens to their music only when sitting in front of a computer, where they have a live helper application watching their every play.

Because Last.fm outright rejects data that looks “spammy”, there’s no opportunity to correct it when, in fact, it was system-, computer-, or even user-error. That data is lost for good. I’ve had days of listening lost like this because just one play on a desktop had been “newer” than my iPod sync, and the program thought I was trying to sneak extra listens in.

But this is the wrong way to run the service because not only does it severely punish the user for common mistakes, but it forces them to change their behavior on how they consume music to meet Last.fm’s strict patterns — just so they can’t spam the service and manipulate the overall charts. Not to mention, there’s an extremely easy way to handle that: it’s called sandboxing. Does it look like spam? Don’t count it. But don’t throw it out either. Put it in a space that can be counted for the user, but doesn’t affect someone else’s stats.

So we’re back at the quote at the top of the page. In a rush to keep duplicate entries from getting into the system, it falsely assumes the tracks were already submitted just by looking at the iPod itself and nothing else. Of course, Mobile Scrobbler keeps its own log and preferences on the device. There’s probably some magic it can do to see if Mobile Scrobbler was on, or if the tracks it was about to scrobble were logged as scrobbled by the app, but hell, it’s not even doing a good enough job to see if the app itself is still installed on the device. If Last.fm could sandbox submissions, it could submit those tracks and then see that, hey, those tracks were never actually submitted, so let’s keep them around after all. Instead, I just lost three days of tracks.

I should be used to this. It’s happened before. This is what I wrote in 2006 on this very same issue:

I literally think “Oh my god, did I update the iPod?!” before playing files in iTunes. Three or four days of straight iPod listening would be erased in a heartbeat because of a careless what’s-that-song-again double-click on the computer. This is a horrible thing to feel and I’m so glad to have finally stopped caring enough about my profile to finally get away from it.

And to the use-case point, I immediately got a nasty comment from some freetard saying that I should stop whining that the site makes me do things their way, and that I should just write my own.^[1]

Having been a user of the service for over five years total now, I’m finally ready to toss the entire thing to the curb. This doesn’t need to be the end, however, but it requires Last.fm to stop treating all users like spammers, and actually build some real intelligence into track submissions and chart creation.

[1] Oh yes, as a working IA professional, a former employee of a Webby-winning music portal, and a passionate user of social media, I am more than ready to write an alternative. VCs or startup CEOs, give me a call. I’ll hook you up for sure.

[Edited 2008-08-15] Russ from Last.fm responded to this post, clarifying: “The (possibly misnamed) spam protection wasn’t created to stop people falsifying scrobbles — it was created to prevent buggy plugins from mistakenly submitting tracks twice, which was an annoyingly common occurrence for a lot of users.”