If Last.FM was a school kid, its report card would state “a quiet achiever”. Not at all like  its classmate, brash, noisy and precocious Facebook. But though Last.FM rarely makes the headlines, I think it actually offers more value for its users.

Facebook is interesting. So you can pop in, check out your mates, see what they are up to, maybe browse some shared links, photos and videos, do a fun quiz and so on. And, er, that’s more or less it. If your friends don’t actively participate, it soon becomes a bit dull.

Last.FM on the other hand offers endless hours of great music and thousands of playlists, whether your “offline” friends participate in the community or not.  You don’t just need to rely on the content selected by your friends. And once you do start to build up a list of friends, Last.FM gets even better. For starters, with the fire.fm plug-in, you can play your friends playlists direct from your firefox browser bar without needing to visit the Last.FM website. And if you don’t like your friends’ music tastes, you can search for other people whose music you DO like and invite them to be friends. And then you can easily find and play their playlists…….. and so it goes.

There are also groups and radio stations (aka playlists) for different types of music, musicians, eras and more. And if you search by artist, you not only see their music and groups but also tour dates and other events.

But its not quite perfect – yet. Once you register, you get a profile page and though Last.FM cleverly personalises it for you by making recommendations based on what you’ve previously listened to, there’s not a lot you can actually do to customise your profile. And you do have to pay around £1.50 a month to get access to advert-free content.

If only the music-related content of Last.FM could be merged with the community tools of Facebook. Now THAT would be worth paying for!