Last.fm is my favoriate web app. There’s nothing else on the Internet that comes close.

This thought occurred to me a few weeks back, but it wasn’t until I explained last.fm to a group of publishers at the Stanford Publishing on the Web course this week that it became a conscious truth.

I mentioned it in the context of the importance of user data in today’s distributed and networked media environment and contrasted it with Pandora. Pandora’s service is driven by vast meta data about content. It’s a very robust service because of the depth of data they work with. But content data without user data is not necessarily a defensible position anymore.

I also happened to stumble on one of the coolest mashups I’ve seen in a while called All Crazy Style via the Yahoo! Mashup Gallery the day of the presentation which I then added into the talk last minute. All Crazy Style simply pulls my last.fm usage data (with my permission) and matches it against my Upcoming.org location (again, with permission) and then shows me where and when the bands I tend to listen to most are playing in my area.

Wow. Love it.

I didn’t know that RJD2 is playing at The Independent in San Francisco December 3rd…and since none of my friends are fans I never would have found out otherwise. And there’s no way an advertisement for such a small event would make it to me through the media I consume.

Additionally, I probably wouldn’t have gone looking through Upcoming.org to find any of these listings, because I’m lazy. But my implicit behavior provides enough data so that I don’t have to explicitly track down when my favorite bands are playing. It also provides enough data to essentially recommend shows that I might like.

I was already a fan of last.fm but I didn’t realize they opened up their APIs this way. Now I’m never going to leave. In fact, I want every music-playing device I own to include the audioscrobbler tracking tool which tracks my listening behavior. I want it to own all my listening behavior, and I want mashups to pull that data to do interesting things for me.

If only I could take last.fm with me offline somehow.

UPDATE: Businessweek coves last.fm this week:

With 15 million unique users a month, 150,000 band biographies, and an amazing 65 million songs listed in its database, Last.FM has attracted the attention of big money.

I hope that’s true for their sake. This is a startup that deserves a big break. But I hope an acquisition doesn’t ruin the service for me.

I’ve probably changed my browser’s default home page about 10 times in the last year. Something about working here at Yahoo! has made me very picky about start pages.

I most recently was using Netvibes which had a couple of really cool modules: a notes box that you could write in just by clicking in it and a sudoku puzzle that I would play on the train ride home. Unfortunately, Netvibes became way too slow for me. I found myself typing in a new URL before Netvibes came up every time I launched a browser window or clicked ‘home’.

I don’t think Netvibes is alone in learning the hard lesson of scaling personalization features. It’s clear that NewsAlloy is struggling under the weight of their usage, and Rojo recently rescued their ailing infrastructure, at least we hope, by adopting a new parent in MovableType.

Even more dramatic is the performance on Wizag. Wizag is one of the most promising start pages I’ve seen yet with its learning and categorization concepts. The design is awful and the speed is unusable, but those problems are easier to solve than developing really new and interesting algorithms. I’m hoping they figure these things out, because I would love to use it more.

Not too long ago I tried switching to Google’s Personalized page. I loved the integration with my phone. You can select modules from your personalized start page that will appear on the phone version. It’s really smart. And it made me try using Google Reader more. But Google Reader is just not the way I want to work with my feed sources, and I got too annoyed.

Why not use My Yahoo! as your browser home page, you ask? I use My Yahoo!, actually. At least weekly. But it shares a problem I have with all personalized start pages…I want my browser to open with something that I don’t know. I want it to lead me, sometimes just a little bit.

And I just learned when I switched to the new Yahoo! home page that I want big pictures, too.

The new Yahoo! home page is brilliant. It has everything I actually want just prior to starting a journey somewhere or even when I’m not sure where to start. I can see the most recent email messages without having to open the full email app. I can check out traffic in my neighborhood, send a quick IM, search and get to my feeds (on My Yahoo!) all from the same place with minimal effort.

But what I love most is that the Yahoo! home page shows me stuff that I don’t know. The top stories have huge impact. They’re inviting, and they make me want to click. And the pulse box always catches my attention with the Top 10 this and Top 10 that.

One of the proven rules in magazine cover selling at the newsstand is that people love top 10 lists. It’s true online, too.

We also learned at InfoWorld how powerful imagery can be when we studied people’s eye movements on a more image-driven home page. The results of that study are here.

No doubt, I’ll switch home pages again soon. I haven’t stuck with one page for more than a few months, but I also don’t remember being as pleased as I am with this page. The dust has settled from the launch earlier in the summer, and I have to agree with what most people in the industry said: The new Yahoo! home page rocks.