My last posts have largely covered the subscribe feature that was announced earlier this week, but I haven’t yet dug into all the changes that have taken place since F8 (at least, not on my blog.) My comment which was quoted by Nick Belton of The New York Times  sums up my thoughts best: “In short, [Facebook] is now a social consumption site, not a social network.”

But I wanted to do a deep dive of my personal experience with the changes thus far. There are many additional changes which won’t be experienced for a while, because they require developers to build apps on top of their new open graph protocol, so I’ll leave detailed commentary on that for a later time. This series of posts covers the rest of the changes:

1. Entertainment Media Partnerships: Spotify, Netflix, and Hulu: B+
2. The New Profile Design “Timeline”: C+
3. Real-Time Ticker: B-
4. Updated Photo Display in Stream: A+
5. Commenting and Privacy: D
6. News Reading within Facebook: C
7. Subscribe, X# of Subscribers & 1 Week Later: TBD

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Entertainment & Media Partnerships with Spotify, Netflix and Hulu
Grade: A-

In one of the best updates to Facebook, the company partnered with major streaming media brands so you can share content about what your listening to, watching, and eventually even reading, in real time. Ever since I joined Spotify and spent my entire Fourth of July weekend making playlists, I was hooked on their unlimited free music streaming (and soon even paid for a $9 a month subscription, which is very unlike me. I haven’t even purchased a Netflix subscription, but the Spotify mobile streaming feature was well worth the fee. Plus, it killed the ads, which were often for hip hop music, which were quite disruptive when I was listening to my “relaxing / classical” playlist and trying to fall asleep.)

But one of my earlier complaints about Spotify was how it, despite having a connection to Facebook and showing me which of my Facebook friends were connected to the service, had an extremely limited social experience. The only real social features were being able to subscribe to their playlists. And, not-so surprisingly, few people had dedicated the time needed to put together killer playlists like I had. Beyond getting excited when someone subscribed to my playlists, the social experience was extremely limited. It was disappointing to say the least, especially after being used to more social music streaming sites like Last.fm and Pandora. Actual discovery of music on Spotify was limited to either clicking around to similar artists on the profile of artists you already like, or listening to new music that was advertised on its homepage.

When Facebook announced the official partnership with Spotify, I did a little nerd happy dance. I don’t yet care about Netflix or Hulu because I watch movies infrequently, and watch my television shows either on TV, or more often, directly through sites like NBC.com and Lifetimetv.com, but finally I could share my playlists with the world, and discover some great new (or old) music in return.

If you don’t already have Spotify, you can now go to www.spotify.com and sign up for a 6 month free account with your Facebook profile.

When you sign on to Spotify, they now prompt you to connect your live streaming behaviors with your Facebook profile. It isn’t clear from this how the music streaming information will populate your profile now or later, but as I rarely listen to anything I’m gravely embarrassed of, I opted in. Immediately, my friend’s Facebook tickers began to be populated with the songs I’m listening to.

Spotify music listening shows up in a few places across Facebook. I’m even still discovering new places it appears.

The most prominent place Spotify listening appears is in the real-time ticker, which is another new feature I’ll cover more in depth in a later post. However, one of the primary issues of the real-time ticker is that it comfortably displays about three small tidbits of information, and if your friends listen to a lot of music, comment updates and photo uploads, which happen more infrequently, are buried by a flood of friend’s live music listening. I’d imagine that once all the other media properties that have official partnership with Facebook take off, the real-time ticker will become a blur of content, but it doesn’t really add much to the social music experience.

In addition to the real-time ticker, occasionally Facebook’s algorithms decide to summarize a friend’s current listening in the general stream. I don’t understand why that happens versus more often when Facebook doesn’t surface this information in the main stream, nor do I know when my own listening preferences are being surfaced in my friend’s streams. It makes me wonder if they are happen to be catching songs that I don’t really love and are just hearing for the first time (see below) versus songs that I have on my playlists. How this information is surfaces just isn’t clear.

Facebook also makes your music listening prominent in their new timeline-based profile redesign:

This is one place where it makes sense for your music choices to display, but it also shows how any accidental content you’ve listened to will display immediately. One of the features I like about the timeline is how this could display over the years, to show the top songs you were listening to that year. This will be cool to look back on in the future. Granted, I’m not sure how this information will be surfaced in the timeline once enough data has been collected in this Facebook-Spotify partnership.

The whole experience is not (yet?) optimized to discover the best music. But the potential is there. Facebook is supposedly adding a feature that will let you listen to music live with your friends, or even watch movies live with friends around the world. That’s pretty darned cool. However, thus far, the connections aren’t optimized for discovery or social sharing of media. I can see this being iterated on and changing in the near future. Clearly, Spotify, Hulu, and Netflix have placed a huge bet on Facebook, and while Facebook may not need them, they need Facebook right now and will make sure the experiences within Facebook generate a solid volume of additional revenues.

Do you want everyone to know what you’re listening to when you’re just browsing?
Then, there are the various behaviors that many do on Spotify that might actually be considered embarrassing, once you realize all of your music streaming choices immediately go on your profile and throughout Facebook the second you press play. This reminds me of the day I was searching random words and clicking on random sound files and managed to find myself listening to an audio clip of a woman having a (very fake) orgasm. Not exactly something I want posted to my Facebook page. But that’s a rather corner case. There are other more common cases that end up displaying, which is why the partnerships so far get a B+. There is a lot of promise here, but it requires additional development to make the experience relevant, and increases the benefits of having your media listening/watching experiences connected to your social graph.

Spotify / Facebook Embarrassment Issues

- To discover new music on Spotify, one of the best ways is to click around and listen to songs for a few seconds, and decide if you like them. Now, if you listen to a song for even one second, it gets shown on your Facebook profile and in the stream

- If you switch songs frequently, they all show up on Facebook (while real time is cool, I’d recommend that Spotify wait 5-10 seconds until a song qualifies for posting to your Facebook profile)

- Probably the worse of the embarrassment issues, as one of my Facebook friends pointed out yesterday, is that the second you click on a song your friend is listening to — even before you know the artist or song — it shows up on your profile that you’re listening to it. While many people don’t mind sharing the music they love, it’s awkward for my friend’s taste in music to suddenly appear like my own taste in music, and it makes you think twice before clicking on music friends are listening to, which defeats the purpose of sharing music socially. Perhaps if you click on a link of what your friend is listening to, for the first time you listen to it, it doesn’t show on your profile. Or at least a setting should be offered to configure this.

… thinking of how this translates to other media properties, I wonder if I want to share my viewing habits with my friends. I don’t actually mind sharing that I’m watching America’s Next Top Model with other fans of the show, but do I want my entire network of nearly 1000 friends and 500 subscribers to see that this is one of my frequent shows I view? This is not the most embarrassing case of content consumption to be sure, and I’m a rather public person — I wonder how this effects the millions of other Facebook users.

Overall, the Media Integrations Get a B+ in My Book

The future of media consumption is social, and it makes sense for Facebook to be at the center of this innovation. It will be interesting to see how sites like Google Plus and Twitter change to battle this move, with Google having access to the entire Internet, as well as ownership of the most popular clip streaming site (YouTube), they can build in more media integration into G+. Meanwhile, Twitter, smaller in audience as it is, has a network of people who like to publicly share content, and could also come out with some meaningful media partnerships. For this battle round on media integration, I have to give the win to Facebook.