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Facebook employee leaks new ‘listen with friends’ Facebook Music feature

Andrew Couts
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A Facebook employee inadvertently revealed a sweet feature of the soon-to-be-released Facebook Music service, which is expected to officially launch at the f8 conference today, reports TechCrunch. Not surprisingly, the new feature brings a social element to listening to music on your computer.

The Facebook employee is Ji Lee, a creative director who formerly worked at Google. His tweet:

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The “Listen with your friend” feature in ticker is blowing my mind. Listen to what your friends are listening. LIVE.

facebook-music-twitterThe tweet was quickly deleted by Lee, who likely didn’t realize that he wasn’t supposed to speak publicly about the feature just yet. Unluckily for Lee, his oversharing was caught in a screengrab before he managed to take it off the web.

While speculation has long pointed to Facebook Music automatically sharing what people are listening to (just as Last.fm does), this is the first time we’ve heard about any feature that would allow users to easily listen to tunes with each other, live — something that’s sure to draw many to the service.

Or not… Facebook rolled out a number of new features yesterday, which sparked a flurry of outrage among many users. As fun and nifty Facebook Music is, it seems likely that users will reel against any changes to the site, no matter what they are.

Facebook Music is also expected to include integration with a number of music streaming services, like Spotify, Rdio and MOG. If the rumors are correct, users will be able to stream music from any of these services through Facebook, rather than the web or desktop applications of those services. Friends will then be able to see what each other is listening to via the ticker, which launched Wednesday.

Obviously, we have no idea exactly how the listen live feature will work, but it would seem users that want to share in their listening experience must also be members of the same streaming service, assuming integration with those services will work in the way we’ve heard.

Either way, the f8 show will kick off later today, and all our Facebook Music questions will be answered.

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