Installation is painless. They’re shipping Nambu as a zip file which you can drop in your Apps folder. Currently FriendFeed and Identi.ca support is disabled adding to the “beta-ey” feel of the app. It may be a little rough around the edges. Some other features seem unfinished. Twitter Groups, for example.

What does work is pretty cool. Nambu presents three different views. A combined view showing a straight-up list of tweets, an Outline view, with a tree on the left showing different types of communications, and a multi-column, browser-like view similar to that of tweetdeck. The People group in Outline view presents a list of thumbnails of profile pictures and hovering over them shows a dark iPhoto-styled palette with additional information about the person.

Another nice feature that should be built into Twitter itself is automatic short-url previews. Hovering over the domain name shows the full link and the link-shortening service in a popup. Nambu provides tr.im and pic.im as integrated options for link-shortening and pictures and calls these part of the “Nambu network”.

Searches show up as a new group in the Outline view or grouped with your friends tweets in the Combined view. A way to hide these would be useful as they can overwhelm your friends pretty easily. They get updated so it’s easy to track specific topics in real-time.

Growl support and badges on the dock icon provide ample notification options.

I don’t think I’m quite ready to replace Twittelator Pro on my iPhone yet, but I’m definitely going to give this a shot on my desktop.

Update: after a day, Nambu’s become inoperative on my laptop. I saw two entries in my Twitter accounts, possibly a result of my MobileMe preferences sync. Deleting my preferences file for Nambu had no effect. Maybe I’ll try it again in a month or so, though, after Neilio’s recommendation yesterday, I may just install Tweetie on Monday.

Last.fm has never had a public radio API, although we’ve tolerated third-party clients using the undocumented calls that our client uses. This is finally about to change – we’re going to make a public, documented streaming API available to everyone who has an API account.

This will block out existing apps like Songbird and Fire.fm to name a couple.

Way to go.

I don’t envy them their position of having to deal with the recording industry (to which they are closely connected via parent company CBS). I don’t expect it’s easy to run a company that gives away music when the RIAA is doing its damnedest to squash file-sharing. I do find it annoying that they’ve carved out three large populations and said, “you can play for free and we’ll just make our money off of these other countries”. I was always under the impression that giving Last.fm our music listening data via scrobbling was all the payment they required. That data’s valuable for tracking what people listen to, how often they listen to it, and I’m sure they can do all sorts of interesting statistical and probabilistic analyses on it to sell it back to the music industry. I guess that’s not the case.

About that data. Knowing that I was shipping listening information to Last.fm made me aware of my listening habits in an unusual way. I was always cognizant of the fact that my listening was being sent upstream to another entity. I was interested in increasing the number of songs I listened to. I was aware when I was listening to certain music “too frequently” and would try to curb that to a degree. I wanted my played music to be representative of my entire collection rather than a few favorite albums. This is subtle, but it changed the way I listened to my music, and not necessarily in a good way. It’s like I was listening to my collection for other people and not just myself.

What did I get out of this? I did get a few very solid musical recommendations. I sent some money to iTunes to buy albums from *stellastar, Cut/Copy, The Helio Sequence and others directly based on Last.fm’s recommendations. The social aspect never really panned-out for me though. I don’t pay attention to what my friends are listening to in any meaningful way. The discussion groups were not interesting to me. It doesn’t really feel much like a “community” in the way that Flickr and other social sites do.

To be fair, $5 per month isn’t a lot of money. I pay that for Xbox Live, but I would have to say that I get a lot more for my money on Xbox Live. Or Flickr Pro. Being able to stream low-quality music over a Flash-based player is not a good value for me considering I always have an iPod of some type close by.

So there we have it. I’m sorry we can’t be friends anymore, Last.fm. I may be back from time-to-time to check in and look up some music. Maybe I’ll take a look at Blip.fm to see what that’s like… If you’ve got a favorite music service on the web (don’t talk to me about Pandora. They don’t like Canada) that works in Canada. Drop me a note in the comments.