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New Facebook Music Feature Accidentally Leaked

Ahead of today’s f8 conference in San Francisco, some new details about Facebook Music have been accidentally leaked by a Facebook employee. We have known about the new music service for a while now, with Facebook partnering up with users of licensed music services like Spotify and Rhapsody able to integrate that platform into their profile pages to make it easier for users of the social network to find out what music their friends are listening to.

However, we now have a further idea of what is possible thanks to yesterday’s leak. Ji Lee, Facebook’s creative director who was poached from Google earlier this year, tweeted something that maybe he shouldn’t have:

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

Mitchell Holder's TwitPic

The rogue tweet was deleted within minutes, but not before Mitchell Holder managed to grab a screen-shot (right). So it appears Lee was talking about one of the key features of Facebook Music that will be launched later on today. For those of you who haven’t yet got the updated Facebook profiles, there is now a ‘news ticker‘ on the right-hand side that gives you real-time updates of what your friends are doing (such as when they comment on status updates, photos, wall posts etc). It looks as if all music you’re listening to will now appear in that side ticker, along with a link to “Listen with your friend”, that when clicked will allow you to listen along to the same song at the same time.

All in all these seem like some pretty interesting developments, but by all accounts these features are going to seem very minor compared to the other changes set to be unveiled at f8.