The day after last.fm performed their controversial "facebook" like redeisgn, I reviewed it and said that they had removed features rather than added new ones, and that the general refresh was unfinished. This is an end user problem that is apparent all over the site, but now i've noticed the API [both old and new] is broken too.

This is fantastic - not only do they take a step back with the new last.fm, but they actually manage to break something that is relied on for the displaying of last.fm data on tonnes of websites. It seems that their goal was to piss people off the most they could, and they seem to have reached that goal here.

There used to be a recently played music widget in my sidebar - it wasn't that recent, because it pulled my weekly most popular albums from last.fm using the old API. This was to get variety and the actual most played album of the week, not just the most recent. But, I refreshed the plugin's cache manually only to find that the plugin reported it couldn't get to last.fm. So, I hopped over to the first version of the last.fm API - and found it to be totally fucked up. This URL is meant to be an XML file that is supposed to be populated with the weekly album chart, part of the old API that worked flawlessly for so long. Why the team at last.fm felt that it needed breaking is beyond the realms of explanation, but still they managed to do it.

I thought I could update the plugin myself to use the new last.fm API, but when I got over to the flickr-like API section I found that the new API's XML data was broken too. There aren't any extra parameters that I don't know about - and even in the documentation on last.fm showed the what the API was meant to output.

I'm sure I speak for many when I say the refresh has been an ABSOLUTE shambles - yeah the design is good, I personally like it, but you should not sacrifice features and functionality just because you want to make your site prettier.