Facebook Music announced with Spotify, Rdio, MOG, and more | Hacker News Reader

Facebook Music announced with Spotify, Rdio, MOG, and more

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35 pointstilt14 comments

This a big win for all the partners, and a potential barrier for anyone who's not a fb partner. I doubt that the real-time media playback sync is going to be available to normal fb apps. It would be really difficult to compete with any media app, music or video, that has partner integration with fb.

I submitted this point as another thread (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3027328) but one interesting detail is that in order to share music, users must choose the same backend provider. I.e., if I use MOG and you use Spotify, we don't get the social features. In practice this is likely to mean one vendor will prevail at the expense of the others -- so being an unpopular partner may not be much better than being a non-partner in a year's time...

Very interesting. Given the regional differences with providers, this caveat may in effect geo-fence sharing by country.

I'm obviously biased, but I'd like to think that even though we're the smaller player, being one of the only 100% free, browser based services that actually has the on-demand features is a big win for us here. Unless everybody is quick to download Spotify or pay up for Rhapsody, Earbits has one of the lowest barriers to entry.

I'm not sure that's right unless we're thinking of different things. I just clicked a ticker story of a friend listening to a song on Rdio, and I clicked a link within that flyout to play the same song in Spotify (which I've been using).

Spotify and Rdio offer a comprehensive and open API to all developers that lets you stream their music to your own player, among other things.

Has this sort of conglomeration been succeeding in technology? The big example is iTunes but Apple is such an outlier everywhere that I don't know whether it generalizes.

It's funny- I remember everyone saying that Facebook was victorious over MySpace because it didn't allow people to customise their profiles and put irritating music players on them.

Now, Facebook has a customisable header (effectively) and integrated music playing. I'm not trying to suggest that the implementation is the same as MySpace's, but it's funny how these concepts come back around again in time.

They get the benefit of knowing what was cool and what wasn't, and more importantly, what could have been cool if it had been done better. Putting one big photo up there is a nice design touch, letting people edit HTML and embed auto-play videos and spyware - not such a good customization feature.

This looks to tactfully aim to do what Beacon clumsily tried to do years ago: capture/publish as much user activity as automatically as possible. The timing is great, too: integration with these new streaming music sites might be the use case that really sells this to the public. As last.fm and turntable.fm have shown, music listening can be so naturally social that auto-publishing should be popular.

Neat feature -- but I agree with one commenter on the site of the article -- why not just get together with you friends and listen to music at the same time? There's lots of live music out there, and most performances are under-attended :(

I currently live ~1500 miles away from most of my closest friends. That's one good reason.

I also travel frequently for work, and I like the idea of remotely listening to and chatting about music with my daughter, since it's something she might actually dig doing with me.

All that being said, I can't see this being an everyday activity.

That's equivalent to asking why people don't just get together in person and talk about what they've been doing, rather than posting updates on facebook.

Great idea :D

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