Facebook has been undergoing many new and exciting changes lately, some are for security of the user, some are to increase the quality of your newsfeed and now they are announcing an amazing new feature that incorporates the ability to identify and post what you’re listening to and what you’re watching.
I know this will raise some alarms to begin with, so we’ll address those first. You have to grant Facebook explicit permission to use your phones microphone so it can detect what you are listening to. Facebook is not storing this information. They are not going to autopost anything. They are not always listening to your microphone either as some may believe.
Share Music on Facebook
This new Facebook addition is similar to other highly used third party apps like Shazam and Soundhoud. The difference here is it is integrated into your Facebook app allowing you to post status updates similar to what we had seen recently with the launch of “how you are feeling”, which by the way was used over 5 billion times last year!
So what does this actually mean? You are listening to your favorite Justin Bieber song :), you want to tell the world what you’re doing, right? Simply turn on the identify option in your status update and voila, no typing. It will detect what you’re listening to and if it identifies it you’re all set. Just like any other post, you can choose who you share it with.
Now for the neatest part, if you share something with your friends, they get a 30 second preview of the song. If you share a TV show, the story in their newsfeed will highlight the specific season and episode you’re watching (they don’t want to spoil it for your fans!).
This feature is completely optional so you do not have to use it. You may create a status and type what you’re listening to or currently watching. If you have the feature turned to ‘off’ it will not use your microphone to detect the sound. It is easy to turn on and off, so you can easily do so at any time. Facebook will only use the microphone (for 15 seconds max) while you’re writing a status update to try and match music, tv show, or movie to the sound it hears.
With this feature ‘ON’ it will NOT record any of your conversations, no matter how interesting it may be :). Facebook isn’t recording and storing your conversations to use at a later date.
