'Track to the Future' Widget

I am pleased to announce the newest addition to my line of Last.fm widgets:  a new music "self-discovery" tool that I have been thinking about (and working on) for a while. As I mentioned in my post 100,000 Last.fm Scrobbles!, I have wanted to do more with my cache of Last.fm data. 

It is a widget that displays an album art visualization for my Top Albums from a historical week, N-years-ago-today. It shows what I was listening to, a certain number of years ago (1 year, 2 years, etc). 

I'm calling it "Track to the Future" as it allows me to refer back to what I listened to in this week in the past 7 years, and I often find myself re-Scrobbling the track in the present week! Get it?

Click to go to the widget's dedicated page.

This widget is again made using a mashup of Yahoo Pipes and my Last.fm data. It links to Spotify to simplify sharing, (just click the Album Art).  And since the Last.fm API uses MusicBrainz' (“The Open Music Encyclopedia”) Identifiers (MBIDs) as its unique identifiers, I’d say it makes for quite a nifty little mashup!

I have previously completed 2 of my ideas within this family of tools: a widget to visualize my Top Albums of the Week, and one to show my albums in Heavy Rotation within the last month (see the sidebar).

You may realize that all of these tools are built to display my own listening data. That is because I actually use these tools as memory-hooks to remind myself of past listening, as a way to visualize my Scrobbling history, as simple music “self-discovery” tools, and a place to direct others who may be interested. However, all of these widgets can be easily copied and altered to work any Last.fm user (provided you have some Last.fm data), so if you are interested in them, let me know, and I’ll start working on making them public.