4-5 years ago, for my first startup idea, I actually spent a few months and built a client that will scan your complete MP3 library, extract and normalize ID3 tags, and sync with a web frontend.
The frontend lets you control and listen to your library in real time, and also multiplex your stream to as many listeners as you want. You could also browse and control your full music library through this.
Yeah, I actually used Icecast as the backend. What I built was a downloadable client that scanned your music library and gave you a nice iTunes like-web frontend to broadcast and listen remotely.
These obviously planned "leaks" that occur just before a company announces something to get the hype machine in gear are really starting to get tiresome.
At least try something more subtle than having a high ranking creative director "accidentally" tweet the feature.
Although I'm sure there are a great many leaks that are planned, I suspect that the frequency of leaks lately are more likely caused by companies being more open and more internally communicative. This is a meta-trend in businesses and loss of some secrecy due to accidentally flapping lips is a small price to pay for the benefits of enhanced collaboration that internal openness brings.
I don't doubt that true leaks happen, but this one smells very strongly of a controlled hype leak. It also isn't even the first time this week that Facebook music's imminent arrival was leaked.
I'd like to suggest that planned leaks that look like this (ie, an employee making a mistake and announcing/confirming a future product) mostly don't make sense for companies of a certain size/maturity/growth/dominance/culture.
Companies want to be able to shape the message people receive about their products, to highlight good or important points and allay certain fears. Leaks are often bad for that, since it inherently relies on third parties to speculate. Whether it's TechCrunch, New York Times, or Robert Scoble, at least one of them will interpret the information in a way that is detrimental to your interests.
If you have a planned leak and you don't tell your employees that you planned it, and you don't take corrective action against the "leaker", you're sending a message that it is okay to be lax about this stuff because there are no consequences. And then you start getting unplanned leaks, which are way worse, since it wouldn't be anything near a carefully crafted perfectly unambiguous planned leak.
If you have a planned leak and you DO tell your employees, then you're going to create a cynical bunch of people, which will hurt productivity and creativity. And they'll tell people about the planned leaks, and you'll lose a lot of credibility (which hurts hiring as well). And they'll start leaving, which is a really heavy cost.
If you have a planned leak and you don't tell your employees (or, even worse, deny it) and you're found out to have done so, you're in an even worse situation.
So I'm not the only one that saw, "The 'Listen with your friend' feature in ticker is blowing my mind. Listen to what your friends are listening. LIVE." and thought, "Why does that impress anybody that much?" Sure, the details are probably technically interesting, but I don't see how this is mind-blowing in any way. (Of course, I'm also over 40, so maybe my reaction is not surprising.)
Is this just marketing hype, or do people genuinely get that worked up about things like this?
I guess it's horses for courses - but I do agree with you that it seems rather bland. I much prefer something like last.fm where I can listen to tracks that others with similar tastes to me are listening to.
Listening to the same thing as your friends right now makes a great demo, increases time on Facebook.com, and is a first step in gathering new data that can be associated with facebook uid's.
Once Facebook has the data for what every person in the world (already close to 1 billion active users) listens to at all times (via FB Connect) then an entire ecosystem will emerge from this data set and the graph API alone.
It might even save last.fm, if they can build something compelling on top of that data.
I think this is one of those things that sounds cool when you first hear it but don't end up using much.
I think one effective use of this would be to introduce someone to a song. I'm not sure that a group of people will be sitting listening to one playlist.
I'd say this is completely and utterly overshadowed by Google's hangouts API allowing you to embed content in a hangout... their first example was shared Youtube video watching.
I know right? All my friend on Facebook are talking about Google's new hangouts API. Nobody has even mentioned the new ticker and if they like it or not!
The best killer music feature I've ever enjoyed was working for a startup where everyone shared their iTunes library on the network. I tuned in to interesting new music everyday. :)
Aw, yet another thing I wanted to build several years ago but never got around to it. I even got a cool domain name for it, just never started coding. It was meant to be just a link you can share with friends, and have it pipe your local audio to them.
My (and my friends') workaround ended up being just sending a link to the song on YouTube to whoever I want to listen to it. Not nearly as seamless as a "proper" solution, of course, but simple enough.
I have been wanting a feature like this for a long time. The ability to share the listening experience even if you and your friend are not in the same physical space is awesome beyond belief. I hope that it is international and has a variety of tracks to choose from.
Even better would be the ability to listen to a communal playlist at real time. This way two people can toss tracks back and forth and just spread the joy of their favorite tracks.
this can really be a killer app if done right. this increases the average time spent on fb further. currently fb and twitter are not doing anything about the users past activities like, likes/tweets/status updates etc., except for images in Facebook. if i wanted to look up an interesting thing i tweeted or shared in the past it is really not that intuitive and most of the time i give up. this music thing can be really huge similar to the images app, not just the live listing feature, currently there is no way to have all my liked music from various apps to be in one place.they may introduce a music tab, they also have my favourite artists, so they may fill my music tab with their songs if available. if done right this can be really huge, the most used app next to images. i hope they can deliver.
lol, i just realized myspace used to do this? anyway i hope the music experience wont effect fb negatively. i can also see fb coming on top of all the current cloud based music services if done right
4-5 years ago, for my first startup idea, I actually spent a few months and built a client that will scan your complete MP3 library, extract and normalize ID3 tags, and sync with a web frontend.
The frontend lets you control and listen to your library in real time, and also multiplex your stream to as many listeners as you want. You could also browse and control your full music library through this.
Relevant news.yc thread from 1631 days ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8753