This Element is an excerpt from Social Networking for Business: Choosing the Right Tools and Resources to Fit Your Needs (9780132357791) by Rawn Shah. Available in print and digital formats.
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Lessons from some of today’s most innovative social businesses: last.fm, LinkedIn, and many more.
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Last.fm offers the equivalent of Web radio stations, with a social aspect that provides innovative customer value: Whenever a listener chooses or plays a song, last.fm uses this as input to future recommendations. To re-create the continuous streaming experience of traditional radio stations, it automatically chooses the next song to play, using its members’ collective preferences and choices to suggest similar artists and bands....
Rawn Shah is Community Editor (and, formerly, SOA and Web Services Zone Editor) for IBM developerWorks. He has 12 years of experience in the IT industry, serving in various roles including positions as a network administrator, an application developer, a vice president of a regional Internet service provider, a columnist, an author, and an editor. He has written more than 280 articles for dozens of technology magazines, including CNN.com, NetworkWorld, JavaWorld, NC World, Windows TechEdge, and LinuxWorld, and was directly involved in the release of the industry-leading publications JavaWorld and LinuxWorld in the mid-1990s.