Facebook Employee Reveals Killer Facebook Music Feature In Deleted Tweet
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
4-5 years ago, for my first startup idea, I actually spent a few months and built a client that will scan your complete MP3 library, extract and normalize ID3 tags, and sync with a web frontend.
The frontend lets you control and listen to your library in real time, and also multiplex your stream to as many listeners as you want. You could also browse and control your full music library through this.
Relevant news.yc thread from 1631 days ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8753
Icecast is the open source version, from a similar time, 1998 or 99. http://www.icecast.org
At least try something more subtle than having a high ranking creative director "accidentally" tweet the feature.
Companies want to be able to shape the message people receive about their products, to highlight good or important points and allay certain fears. Leaks are often bad for that, since it inherently relies on third parties to speculate. Whether it's TechCrunch, New York Times, or Robert Scoble, at least one of them will interpret the information in a way that is detrimental to your interests.
If you have a planned leak and you don't tell your employees that you planned it, and you don't take corrective action against the "leaker", you're sending a message that it is okay to be lax about this stuff because there are no consequences. And then you start getting unplanned leaks, which are way worse, since it wouldn't be anything near a carefully crafted perfectly unambiguous planned leak.
If you have a planned leak and you DO tell your employees, then you're going to create a cynical bunch of people, which will hurt productivity and creativity. And they'll tell people about the planned leaks, and you'll lose a lot of credibility (which hurts hiring as well). And they'll start leaving, which is a really heavy cost.
If you have a planned leak and you don't tell your employees (or, even worse, deny it) and you're found out to have done so, you're in an even worse situation.
Is this just marketing hype, or do people genuinely get that worked up about things like this?
Once Facebook has the data for what every person in the world (already close to 1 billion active users) listens to at all times (via FB Connect) then an entire ecosystem will emerge from this data set and the graph API alone.
It might even save last.fm, if they can build something compelling on top of that data.
Either you don't like that music: You ignore it
Or you are a fan of that music: You most likely have it already
Neither of them is true: Share a YouTube link. This even allows you to choose when you want to hear it
My (and my friends') workaround ended up being just sending a link to the song on YouTube to whoever I want to listen to it. Not nearly as seamless as a "proper" solution, of course, but simple enough.
Even better would be the ability to listen to a communal playlist at real time. This way two people can toss tracks back and forth and just spread the joy of their favorite tracks.