David Emery Online

Some thoughts on Facebook

23 September 2011

“Boom!”

It came about a third of the way into Mark Zuckerberg’s F8 keynote, but it was obvious far earlier that he was putting on his very best Steve Jobs impression. And, to be honest, he didn’t really do that bad a job of it; sure, his presentation style needs a lot of work – he really needs to stop laughing as much at his own jokes for a start – but the products they announced definitely had an Apple feel to them.

The new timeline profile is the perfect example of that – great visual design, coupled with innovation and a willingness to cast aside something extremely popular for something completely different, but better. I’ve so far been quite unimpressed by Google+, but what Facebook are doing now just makes them look silly – they are leagues ahead, with Google struggling to catch up to where they were a couple of years ago (again – see also Apple versus other tablet makers).

So, what about the music elements? Another constant around Apple keynotes are the wild rumours that fly around before hand, that don’t quite get fulfilled, and we had the same here. The talk of a service-agnostic playing system, where it would figure out how a track posted from Rdio could be listened to by someone using Spotify, proved to be sadly false (unsurprisingly, really, as it would have been a nightmare to make reliable).

What we got instead was actually fairly simple – if you’re signed in using Facebook to a music service, tracks you listen to get pushed to your profile and ticker (more on that later), and other people – using the same service as you – can click play buttons in those posts and hear the tracks. The music isn’t actually played on Facebook – it launches your player app in the background (for Spotify at least, I’m unsure what it does for web-based services like MOG) and hence the interface on Facebook is extremely minimal – just little play buttons next to a packshot, nothing more.

It seems like this is very much the start of music on Facebook, rather than the conclusion as it’s very basic stuff. It’s also the start of a complete domination of the streaming market by Spotify, I suspect. While this setup is in theory open to lots of other services, as it doesn’t match tracks across them you’re going to need to be using the same service as your friends. Spotify already has the biggest userbase by some way, and this is going to massively accelerate gaining new users until it becomes the de facto standard.

As an aside, I wonder what Apple thinks of all this? While simple, this offering seems very much like iTunes Ping Done Right (remember Ping?). The biggest social network in the world now being tied very directly into a player other than iTunes, and a store (of sorts) other than iTunes store surely must have an impact?

Presumably it could have an impact on recorded music sales as well; it’s reinforcing the concept that music is “free” (with ads, of course) – and that ownership is perhaps unnecessary – to a large audience. The flipside though is increased exposure so I posit that this will be good for more alternative music, that doesn’t get as much mainstream coverage and hence will benefit most from enhanced social word of mouth, and bad for more disposable pop as it will decrease the chance people will need to actually buy the track. That is – of course – assuming those tracks are actually available on a streaming service, which is a whole other topic for a different day…

One of the most interesting things that Facebook have done this week actually launched the day before F8, although only revealed its true purpose yesterday: the ticker. The ticker sits on the top right of your home page, and sits there giving you realtime updates of everything that’s going on in your social group. It’s basically what the news feed originally was, made realtime, with the news feed having adapted to being more of an edited summary by necessity as the growth of what people were sharing exceeded its original design.

What makes the ticker interesting, is that this now enables Facebook to allow third party apps to post a lot more events – they’re not going to clutter up the news feed, they can live in the ticker and on your profile timeline. The net result is that Facebook has enabled Last.fm-style scrobbling of activity, but for everything – not just music, but reading, watching and pretty much anything else you could think of. It’s actually quite similar to what their infamous disastrous Beacon initiative was trying to get at, but done right and completely opt-in.

I do feel for Last.fm at this point, as they seem to have had their lunch money taken – not only have they exposed scrobbling (or it’s equivalent) to a huge audience, and taken it much further, they’ve also managed to get on-demand streaming working, which Last.fm tried and failed at making it make any sense financially. On the new music page it even has some limited recommendations – it’s not sophisticated, but it’s probably good enough.

All in all, Facebook seem to be way ahead of the curve at the moment – they’re implementing features that could fundamentally change culture, which sounds like ridiculous hyperbole, but isn’t. It’ll be interesting to see how it all plays out.