June 2nd site update: Friend Finder beta

Hello!

We've got an exciting update for you today: the new Last.fm Friend Finder. We've been working feverishly on this for the past few weeks, and it's ready for some carefully selected people (that's you!) to give it a spin. This is a subscriber-only beta for now, but it'll soon be available to everybody.

You can use your Facebook, Gmail, or Yahoo contacts to find friends on Last.fm, as well as friends of your existing Last.fm friends. Once you've allowed Last.fm to access your contacts, you'll see a page of your friends – ready to add those you like, and skip over those you're not so keen on. :)

We take your privacy seriously and understand some people won't want to be found. By default nobody will see your Last.fm username or have any links to your profile – they'll know you have an account on Last.fm and can send you a friend request, but that's it. Of course, it works better if you opt in so we can tell your friends more about you. Or if you want to be completely invisible, you can opt out completely too. These options are available to all users now, not just beta testers.

As this is beta there's bound to be some rough edges and bugs – you can report them in this thread. We'd also love to hear your general feedback, good and bad. Depending on your circle of friends you may find that your Facebook friends are a little sparse to begin with, but that'll improve as more people use the friend finder. Gmail and Yahoo'll be awesome off the bat, though.

So what are you waiting for? If you're a subscriber you should check out the beta now. If you're not, why not subscribe and check it out?


We hope you like it and can't wait to hear your feedback,

— Team Last.fm.

I love the friend finder already. Found lots of people I didn't know had a Last.fm account :D. Have been waiting a long time for this. thanks.

Correct me if I've got this wrong...

If the user doesn't opt in or out, what's displayed is:
Bob Jones is on Last.fm
Top artist: Spice Girls
Add Friend
And if I opt out, I don't show up anywhere. But what happens now that I've opted in, does everyone get a link to my profile? That'd be what I expect.

Love this feature guys, thanks!

Sweet, we found 4 people from Facebook that you might want to be friends with.
Sweet, we found 112 people from Google Mail that you might want to be friends with.

Is it down?

This feature is awesome and I've waited on it for years, thank you so much!

One thing: It should have a way of visiting their profile so we'll know their username and be able to visit them before requesting a friendship.

Additional suggestions:
- Hotmail
- Twitter

acreature said:
Naijca said:
One thing: It should have a way of visiting their profile so we'll know their username and be able to visit them before requesting a friendship.

Once a user's opted in you'll get those details – you can expect to see more of them once more people start using the friend finder. I just don't see why it's looked at as private if you already have them on Facebook, which means you most likely already have their real name and their pictures. Not everyone wants to share their music habits, I guess.

But I understand, I really hope we'll see this feature in the future though, once it's getting more popular.

Nice feature, thanks! The more friends the better IMO

*opts in*

As usual, many thanks for the update. I love the friend finder. How about importing Linkedin contacts?

very good, is a vital feature :) I liked too much

Would have been funny but one week ago I deleted my FB-account.
--> opt-out
Still good that you finally implemented it.

I am opted "in", hales yeah! Now this, is what I call a tremendous step forward and being a sub only feature, is super smart, IMO =)

DFA1979 said:
CrybKeeper said:
I am opted "in", hales yeah! Now this, is what I call a tremendous step forward and being a sub only feature, is super smart, IMO =)The beta is subscriber-only, but it won't stay that way.

Oh booooo! LastFM need to try some things to make a subscription worthwhile. Thanks for telling me though DFA1979 ;-)

I don't know how it worked, but the new 'friend finder' found one of my friends from You Tube. Although her alias is the same everywhere, so maybe that is why?

acreature said:
... as well as friends of your existing Last.fm friends.I guess that is where these come from? Maybe you should add an explanation to that page that these are friends of my existing Last.fm friends.

And I also noticed on the "Applications" tab of my Last.fm settings that the Facebook app has been added automatically: "Facebook - Bootstrap your profile, find your friends, and more." Maybe that should be mentioned, too.

It might make sense to add Myspace to the friend finder, especially for bands on Last.fm and/or their related user accounts. The same is true for Facebook "pages" and the personal account who maintains the band profile there. So it would be handy to see the related Facebook pages as well if you want to become a fan of them (which is different from becoming a friend of the personal user account).

Facebook and Last.fm work similar in this regard, i.e. with one email address you have one personal account and handle one or more band profiles. The difference is that Facebook now shows the admin of the band profile on that page if you want to. Myspace only allows one email address for each account though, so even if you have a personal account and one or more band profiles, they do not have the same contact email address which makes it more difficult for the friend finder to find a connection. But it might be possible to add the different addresses to the friend finder manually, so the accounts and related profiles can be found as well.