Hello, first let me congratulate your group for starting this project, I think this is a much needed direction on these times where every corporation wants to collect as much information about you as possible and sell to the highest bidder.
The idea of a scrobbling service where the data belonged to the users is something I've been thinking about for some time. I have a dream where "everyone" has its own private server somewhere on the internet (in their living rooms maybe - maybe ipv6 could bring that), and this server has all the data people currently post all over the web. So instead of a facebook account I'd have a service on that server that I'd give access to the few select people I trust. The same for music listening logs and stats, blogging, microblogging, etc. I could dream on about the details of implementation, something where I'd be easy to share only the specific info I want to the specific people I want, the server would be a simple application and you could add modules as desired ... but I'll just say the most important thing is that I keep my data and only give to those I trust and only when needed. The business plan of every social website seems to be having lots of advertisement or selling the users data ... or both. I abhor advertisement of all sorts (I thinks its immoral, unnecessary and corrupts the only thing capitalism got right, but I digress...), and promising privacy and then either selling the data or giving it away to the government and interested parties after a simple phone call is despicable. Of course a website like last.fm needs user data to exist, so it can generate statistics, recommendations and be much more useful than just an interface to a single user's listen logs. What I am asking with this email is actually two things. First, since you are hosting the data, how do you intend to pay for the costs? (Sorry, my adblock is tight and I'm too poor right now to donate). Second, could it be possible to have something similar to what I proposed, that I host my own data and scrobble (do you still use that term?) to my own server and either periodically or automatically the data is anonymously synced with your server so I can help with the stats gathering? I'm not even suggesting you should switch, but personally as a programmer if you were using python I'd jump on this project right now ... maybe If you think the multi-server thing is doable, I could write my own in python and maybe even start showing the code for that personal server instead of just talking :) I look forward to your comments.
