There’s a ton of news pouring out of Facebook’s F8 Conference in San Francisco today. I can only take so much of it in, but there is one story from Mashable that jumped out at me.
Made possible by Facebook’s new Open Graph protocol, Pandora will be able to stream music directly on Facebook.com from bands you’ve “liked” across the web. You’ll be able to see which of your friends likes similar music and check out what other music they like and have in their collections.
The combination of Open Graph and the new, wide-reaching “Facebook Like” button around the web means that “liking” a band on a third-party site will register with your Facebook profile, which can in turn inform your Pandora profile even while you’re discovering music at other points around the web. It also tightly hooks your Pandora profile with your “real” social graph of friends on Facebook.
In the words of CEO Mark Zuckerberg, all of this allows the social networking juggernaut to build “instantly social and personalized experiences” thanks to this underlying level of social graph integration.
If you don’t yet use Pandora, allow me to explain that you train the site to know what music you enjoy and most want to hear. Facebook is proposing to bring that ability to the entire web. It sounds highly utilitarian, and I’m sure I’ll play around with it some. It also seems like another land grab by an already grabby company of nerds.
Previously on AdPulp: Big Writeup in The Times On Pandora’s Musical Geekery