According to the BBC, CBS has just plunked down $280 million to make a late entrance into the social networking fray: they’re now the proud owners of one shiny music recommendation-cum-nerd-hookup site in Last.fm. The crafty Brits behind the site and the deal have retained control of their creation and hope that support from their ginormous new daddy will help them “get every track ever recorded and every music video ever made” into the site’s library, according to Last.fm founding partner Martin Stiksel.

What does CBS want with the seemingly small (when compared to Myspace or Facebook) 15 million users on Last.fm? As CBS president and CEO Leslie Moonves “Last.fm is one of the fastest growing online communities out there… Their demographics also play perfectly to CBS’s goal to attract younger viewers and listeners across our businesses.” Myspace paid a similar amount for photo hosting site Photobucket (which boasts almost twice as many users) earlier this month, leading many industry pundits to speculate that CBS is most interested in the potential of Last.fm’s “Audioscrobbling” collaborative filtering technology. It basically notes what you play on streaming radio stations or in your own iTunes, uses that info to recommend more stuff you might like based on what other fans of that artist are listening to. Interesting, but nothing new – Sonicnet.com had a recommendation engine-driven streaming radio player when it was bought by MTV 8 years ago. The technology isn’t revolutionary, but it requires a broad and enthusiastic network of users to be valuable. Seems to this casual observer that CBS is banking on Last.fm’s fanatic stable of devotees to cash in on the potential of the concept and translate it into increased visibility for other arms of its media empire.

Now, I’ve got a lot of friends who swear by this program’s ability to introduce them to hot new bands and hot new fans of those bands, but there’s something creepy about sharing my most intimate secrets (like what I listen to when I’m in the shower) with the whole wide Web..sure, I’ll tell you what I think about this and that all day here, but I don’t need you knowing about my unabashed morbid fascination with a certain ridiculous pop-punk band or the startling frequency of my Cheap Trick singalongs.

Regardless, this begs the question: is the current gobble up of the once-rogue Web 2.0 communities the second dot com boom?

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