I’m sure you remember Turntable.fm, the free online service that lets you DJ online for your remote friends and complete strangers across the web. It was cool for a while, but quickly lost its novelty when people realized that they were putting all of this work into it, and not really getting much back aside from a couple of anonymous head nods. Well, Facebook just took that idea and made it much more accessible: it’s time to listen with friends.
The “Listen with Friends” feature, which was rolled out today, is the newest addition to Facebook’s Open Graph capabilities. If you have Spotify or Rdio (or any other music service that integrates Facebook’s API), then your friends are already pestered by constant notifications of what you’re listening to. This is just the next logical evolution of that functionality. Soon you’ll begin seeing little music notes next to your friends’ names in the chat window. When you roll over said friend’s name, the option to listen in will show up. When the song changes from him, it changes for you. And just like that, you’ve become a DJ…or an obnoxiously critical music listener, depending on your point of view.
Then you use Facebook Chat to rip apart your friend’s music taste. The more people listen in, the larger the chat gets. This is the beginning of something amazing. I see the world’s first Facebook concert on the horizon.
