Facebook has started to roll out its social music listening service from today. The new feature allows you to listen to the same track that your friend is listening to, and even comment on it and discuss the background of the song being played.
You may choose how many people would be able to listen to the song that you are playing or just share it with a single friend. The music note would appear in the chat sidebar, where you can see what your friends are listening to. However, anyone who wants to share or view songs that are being played must be registered on one of the online music services with which Facebook has tie-ups.
This could be a great way to discover music and also discuss which the latest tracks in town are. Last.fm, which also is supremely social and informative, allows a similar feature where you can actually make new friends depending on their musical orientation. Last.fm would be more like a nightclub where you discover people who like similar genres of music, and the new Facebook feature would be like playing music in your living room and forcing your friends to listen to what you like, or be forced to listen to what others like.
If you don’t want your music listening to be social and be splattered all over your timeline, you can opt out of the feature by changing your privacy settings in your activity log. It could be an interesting feature for many people who usually listen to music with a close-knit group of friends. The feature was made available for many Facebook users today and will be rolled out to others as well in next few weeks. You could also try and understand Facebook in an interesting infographic that we had featured sometime back. If you have the time, you could take a look at the 17 Fun Facebook Products and Designs that we had listed earlier.