What happened to my Last.fm Tumblr Feed?
Several people emailed me asking why they didn’t get an update for their Last.fm Tumblr Top Artist feed this week. As per my standard protocol for customer service emails, I blamed it on someone else. In this case, that seems to actually be true. Last.fm launched a new site this week. I use an old version of their API for the top artists data. Both the old API and the new API aren’t returning data now, but I’m sure they’ll fix that.
In the meantime, the Last.fm Tumblr feed haters can enjoy a dashboard free of Top 5’s. It’s funny when people tell other Tumblr members what they should or shouldn’t post on their blog. I really don’t care if people use the Last.fm Tumblr feed and I can appreciate that some people don’t like them, but isn’t this a tool for self-expression (yes, that includes expressing dislike for others posts)? That said, there’s a lot of stuff I’d like to remove from my dashboard without unfollowing a person entirely. Rather than ask people to change their posting style, it would be cool if Tumblr offered better options to filter unwanted posts from the dashboard. On FriendFeed, for example, there is a “hide” feature that lets you specify what information you want to remove for other people’s posts. Tumblr could offer a similar button next to each post in the dashboard. On click, we could choose to hide that post and all reblogs of it or to hide all posts of that type from that user going forward (ex. “hide all audio posts from joelaz”), including updates for an imported feed (ex. “hide all Last.fm Tumblr posts from joelaz”). I might use it to hide music from people with different taste, or for Twitter updates from people I follow on Twitter.
Anyhoo, Tumblr should adapt to us, not us to it. Post whatever you want.
