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Comment by npollock | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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...

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).

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.

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

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.

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