Facebook has announced today a new feature that they are adding into the Facebook apps for Android and iOS. Facebook has always been about sharing bits and pieces of your life with the world you know, but more specifically with your friends and family on your friends list. The new feature will make it easy for users to scan music or TV shows that are playing in the background using their smartphones mic, after which the software that Facebook uses for the new feature will analyze the sound and identify what’s playing. The initial idea is so that you can more easily share to your wall what you’re currently listening to or what your watching with your friends.
The new feature doesn’t just scan for music and TV shows, but movies too. So if you’re watching the latest episode of Game of Thrones or you just went and saw The Amazing Spider-Man 2, you can have your mic analyze the sound and share that information to your wall. The new feature is something that users can choose to turn on or off, so it isn’t automatically there and integrated with Facebook. If you do choose to turn the feature on however, anytime you go to update your status, if you’re listening to music, TV or a movie at the time you’ll see the audio analyzer being to work its magic as your updating your post. It’ll flip you back results if there is anything that it picks up, and you can choose to share it or not.
As far as the function goes, this is similar to what Sound Hound or Shazam has been doing for years, and the same functionality as what Google’s Sound Search widget does. It takes things a step further though by analyzing movies and TV as well, and not just music. You can turn the feature off at any time just by touching the audio icon and you get control over who sees posts that include the sounds that you share. What’s really cool is that by sharing a song that you’re currently listening to, the friends you share it with can listen to a 30 second snippet of the song, and with TV shows, the posts displays what season and episode you’re currently watching so that friends will notice. Facebook’s example of usefulness here is to try and help you avoid any spoilers for shows, giving you time to catch up, but that would all depend on who sees the post to begin with. Right now the feature isn’t available but Facebook states that it will be added to the app in the coming weeks. So look for an update around mid-June.