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Listen With

I see what you did there, Dan — bury the lede a little deeper, why don’t you? :)

http://ex.fm/labs/listen-along/whitneymcn

Yesterday Facebook got into the “Listen With” game by announcing a new feature that allows people to click a button and listen to what their friends are listening to along with them. I haven’t tried it yet but it does look pretty nice.

Of course, as soon as they announced it, everyone cried “they are stealing from Turntable.fm”. Techcrunch even ran a followup post where Billy Chasen the founder of Turntable.fm said he was flattered Facebook was copying them.

Here’s the thing: Facebook is not copying Turntable. Not only are the features pretty different, but the idea of listening with friends is as old as, I don’t know, say, music.

As listening moved online, one of the promises of that was the idea that we could now network our stereos and listen to music with other people regardless of physical location. I’ll argue that no one has nailed it yet but clearly we are getting close. I believe the way to do it right is to study how, why and when people listen to music and then shape these tools to support that behavior. We (exfm) have some interesting ideas around how to do this, but are not ready to roll anything substantial out yet. Judging from the comments on those TC posts, it looks like there are a bunch of sites out there trying as well.

So to sum up, no Facebook is not copying Turntable.fm. Listening with friends online is a pretty old idea (see my 2004 grad school project Awaire). A bunch of sites are also doing this (see Tomahawk). And in my opinion nobody has gotten it right yet. Oh and if you really want to Listen With in exfm, ok fine, you can do that right here.