Partnering, freemuim services and help

Interesting trend emerging of on line ventures that are retreating back to core activities and specialities. Last.fm no longer supports its official Facebook app, because they cant keep up with the pace of innovation from the external community.

In fairness, it’s a pretty good  question to be asking.  - what is my core offering on web?  Tough question. For last.fm, its music discovery. For a bank, its online banking. For a taxi company, its immediate delivery of local available taxis to your mobile web on your phone.

What’s clear is:

a.  It’s tricky enough figuring out what your business should be on line.

b. If you can nail above, you then need to partner online to innovative quicker and cheaper.

Why build a internal piece of software, when your business is a taxi company? Get it from a trusted source. Rent before you buy. No matter how good the internal technical team, the wider community as a whole will always be stronger.

Google Chrome OS (potentially the “windows of software for the mobile industry”) is an open sourced platform. Anybody can innovative on top of it. Hats off to Google. Nice work from a share price perspective. http://bit.ly/79FxKR

Third party partnerships online are all the rage. It’s impossible to keep up in one niche, never mind 10. Freemium API access, quality yet good value back end CMS’s and decent working technical partnerships are all the rage.

As most “old” businesses start looking to mobile web as the new frontier to win clients, it would be wise to step back and figure out what can your company offer on the web that is sustainable, yet get you to your end of year budgets.

Last.fm retired the ‘Last.fm

Music’ application on Wednesday, November 4th, 2009 and new installs of the application have been disabled.

Really? How come?
The Last.fm developer community has grown a lot in recent years, and we feel the time is right to withdraw our old, buggy and under-supported official applications and encourage use of community-built applications instead. This move will let us dedicate more time to our core site and services, ensuring you have access to lots of cool stuff powered by your music profile in future.

Where can I get other apps?
For now, two good places to start include the Facebook app directory and build.last.fm. Developers should also check out the growing Last.fm API.

We sincerely apologise for the obvious inconvenience the retirement of this application will cause. Thanks to everyone who has used it over the last two and a half years. — Team Last.fm