Facebook Announces New Partnerships For Music, Movies And TV

Facebook took a leap Thursday towards making itself into what it hopes will be the social center for entertainment and media. Youll be able to see what movies and TV your friends are viewing, what music theyre listening to and what news items theyre reading. You could say Mark Zuckerberg dressed down for Facebooks annual developers conference in San Francisco. He wasnt wearing his infamous hoodie. He took the stage in jeans and a T-shirt. He introduced a much anticipated music sharing feature which he says will permit Facebook users to see what songs their friends are listening to on the cloud-based streaming service Spotify. “Its awesome how much music you can discover through your friends,” said Zuckerberg. “Its really cool. You just see it flow through on the side of your screen or on your news feed if there’s an interesting pattern. You discover a bunch of new stuff this way.” Zuckerberg says, even more importantly, you will be able to listen along with them if you subscribe to their feed. It will not just be music. Reed Hastings, the CEO of Netflix, came on stage to introduce a feature on which his company is collaborating with Facebook. Hastings said a friend kept wanting him to view Breaking Bad, but he hadnt gotten around to it. Then he saw a notice on Facebook that his friend was viewing it. Using the prototype feature he went straight to Netflix without leaving the Facebook page. “I thought, That would be so cool. I click on Breaking Bad,” Hastings said, “and I realized, Oh my god,there it is right in front of me.” Hulu is also partnering with Facebook on a similar feature. News organizations such as Dow Jones will make it possible for you to see what your friends are reading, read along with them and chat in real time. Creative Strategies analyst Tim Bajarin thinks this is a really good opportunity for content makers. “Youre now discussing an audience of 800 million users [the estimated number of users on Facebook],” he says. “I mean that is just staggering — an audience such as that is, in essence, just a gigantic new opportunity.” But, says Nancy Baym, Professor of Communications Studies at the University of Kansas, it may not be that easy to get their attention. She notes people will be able to what their friends are doing on a recently rolled out feature called a ticker that scrolls down the side of the Facebook page. “Mine is going through pretty rapidly, which makes me think that a bunch of it is gonna get lost,” says Baym, as she viewes her ticker move. “Once every 100 things a song will come through and I may or may not be searching at that box at that particular moment.” Sharing stuff on a social networking site or a music streaming site isnt all that new. Whats unique about what Facebook announced Thursday is that these collaborations with content providers will keep you on the Facebook page for a very lengthy time — enabling the company to collect more information about you and send you more targeted ads. Theyll know what you eat, what you read, what you view. But even that might not be somewhat so new. Baym says it reminds her a bit of a company in the early 1990s. “Facebook is putting forth effort to recreate AOL of 1993 and be the only place you must go on the Internet,” she says. “AOL at that time was a one-stop shop. If you were an AOL subscriber you could use AOL — and you could use the rest of the Internet and all of your interaction and all of your discussion was happening with in the aol.com url.” Of course, we all know that AOL hasnt exactly been the success story that Facebook has. At the developers conference Zuckerberg announced that for the first time half a billion people were using his site at the same time.