Last.fm FlickrFan Concert Photos
Are you a Last.fm fan? Would you like a free screen saver featuring awesome concert photos from your favorite bands. Do you use a Mac? If so, read on.
Dave Winer launched a new image feed reader yesterday called FlickrFan. His software basically creates a screen saver out of photos from your Flickr contacts and the AP news image feed. Fred and Bijan had nice things to say about it, so I downloaded a copy. I like the Flickr integration, but as many people have correctly pointed out, similar functionality has been available through other screensavers for some time. The AP photos didn’t appeal to me personally. World news just seems too depressing most days. What interested me most was the ability to easily add a custom feed. I’m into music and wanted a screen saver that showed off concerts I’m interested in. So, I thought I’d try to whip something together that pulls in Flickr photos of my favorite bands.
After an hour or so of experimenting with the Flickr & Last.fm API’s using Yahoo! Pipes, I was able to create a personalized feed that searches Flickr for highly relevant concert photos based on the music interests for a Last.fm user name. The feed updates as you listen to new bands or as new interesting photos appear for those artists on Flickr. All the photos include Creative Commons licenses and an attribution link back to the Flickr photo page, meaning I’m respecting the photographers’ permissions (something that I believe is currently missing from Dave’s standard feeds). Try it out and let me know what you think.
To add the feed to your MacBook, MacBook Pro, or Mac-enabled TV, just follow these simple steps:
- Download and install FlickrFan
- Go to my Last.fm FlickrFan page
- Enter your Last.fm user name and click “run pipe”
- Click “More options > Get as RSS”
- Copy that URL to your clipboard
- Go to the FlickrFan home page on your computer and choose the “Feeds” tab
- Scroll to the bottom of the page and add the new feed URL that you copied in the previous step
- Done!
Your computer should start downloading the first few images within a few minutes. Updates will process automatically based on your weekly artist chart from Last.fm.
Now if only I had one of those fancy plasma HDTVs to view this on instead of my teeny 13-inch MacBook screen (sniff).
