DAILYHOSTNEWS, January14, 2012 – Starting this week, Facebook is rolling out a new feature that will let you listen to music along with your Facebook friends.
In other words, if your buddy Gupta is rocking out to Frankie Valli on Facebook via Spotify, you can click a handy little “Listen With” button and rock out with him.
“Being able to click on someone’s music and play it is a great experience, but knowing that you helped a friend discover something new … is awesome,” said Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg when the Listen With feature was previewed at a developer conference last year.
As Facebooker Alexandre Roche writes on the company blog, “You can listen to the same song, at the exact same time. So when your favorite vocal part comes in you can experience it together, just like when you’re jamming out at a performance or dance club.”
Not only can you and Gupta listen together; Gupta’s other friends, like Fred and Assha, can also join in and listen along, with Gupta acting as DJ. It sounds a bit like Turntable.fm without the awesome avatars and addictive game mechanics — but with, 800 million people signed up as users.
Of course, Facebook has some new privacy settings to go along with this fun feature.
“Only the people you’ve shared your listening activity with can see when you’re listening with a friend,” we read in the relevant Facebook Help section.
“You can control privacy settings in music apps when you install the app or on your App Settings page after you’ve installed the app. You can also remove songs you listened to from your timeline on your private activity log.”
The feature has been known since f8, Facebook’s developer conference last year, when the company announced it would start integrating music and movies with listen-along and watch-along functionality
As of November 2011, Facebook users had already listened to around 1.5 billion songs on Facebook.
