When he announced Facebook’s new video chat feature, Mark Zuckerberg made sure to add that there will be many exciting new announcements in the not too distant future. A software developer named Jeff Rose may have figured out what the next announcement is.
On his blog Life Is a Graph, Rose described what happened when he downloaded Facebook’s new video chat. Curious about how the system operated, he started taking a closer look and found the Facebook Peeps command line. What he also found though was another command line for a “MusicDownloadDialog.” That leaves one of two options. Either Facebook is about to launch a music downloading option or it looked into it and abandoned the effort, without erasing the evidence.
One reason people tend to believe the first option is that Spotify, the popular European music downloading service, announced on the front page of their website, “Spotify is coming to the U.S.” In late May, Forbes announced that this could happen in as little as two weeks, and that Spotify would be partnering with Facebook.
A month and a half has passed since then, and there has been no announcement. They may have been wrong about the date, there may have been some kinks to iron out, but they may still be partnering with Facebook. After all, Forbes was quite adamant that “the integrated service is currently going through testing.” It could be that what Rose saw was some atavistic relic of testing gone bad, or that the testing is still underway.
Spotify did just finish a $1 billion round of financing, with money pouring in from the usual suspects: Accel, Kleiner Perkins, and DST. One of the investors was Napster founder Sean Parker, a man who knows a thing or two about music downloading services. He also knows a thing or two about Facebook, having served as the company’s first president.
Parker’s doppelganger Justin Timberlake is now working at Myspace as Head of Creative Strategy. His self-proclaimed role in the company is to use “its social media platform to bring artists and fans together in one community.”
There was a time even as late as Parker’s tenure that Facebook and Myspace were rivals. While Facebook may have won that race, it is unlikely that it will give Myspace an edge up on anything. And People like music, whether it is downloading songs on iTunes or watching videos on Youtube. Jeff Rose seems to be on to something.
Read More at Life Is a Graph.
Read More at Forbes.
Read More at Tech Crunch.
