Here’s a little Altio app I built with a couple of guys from work (I work at Altio) that uses the new Graph custom control and the data feeds from the music website Last.fm to map connections between Last.fm users and their friends based on the music they listen to. If you give it your Last.fm username (or try mine if you don’t have one : HeyChinaski) it will load you and all the artists you’ve listened to in the last week in to a diagram. It will then load each of your friends and show which of them has been listening to the same artists this week.

Loading Last.fm’s data can be pretty slow so it only loads the first 10 friends it can find. Once it’s finished loading you can navigate by dragging the canvas or the map in the corner. You can zoom using the slider in the bottom corner or by rolling the mouse wheel. You can load more data by right-clicking on a friend and clicking expand. That will then add their artists and their friend data to the graph. You can also right-click->expand on yourself to add more of your friends (if you have more than 10!). If you don’t like the current lay out of the graph you can right-click and click redo layout and it will try another configuration. You can also drag the user and artist nodes around. You can open the Last.fm page of any user or artist by double clicking on their username.

Tags: altio, diagram, graph, graphing, last.fm, music

This entry was posted on Friday, March 7th, 2008 at 4:27 pm and is filed under altio. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.