Facebook has just taken the wraps off a fairly significant new feature in the past few moments that allows users to share and discover new music, movies and TV shows with very little effort involved. As of now – if you decide to opt-in – you’ll be able to use your device’s microphone to detect what movie, TV show or music track you’re currently engaged in, without the need to type this info yourself.
As pointed out by Facebook, users share all manner of information via status updates including their mood and how they’re feeling, what they’re doing with their time, or what they might be eating. With this new feature, Facebook has streamlined the process for sharing your currently-watching / listening content, which in turn enables your friends and followers to discover new movies, TV shows or music that they may also wish to enjoy.
So if you’re watching and happen to be enjoying Breaking Bad — and let’s face it, almost everybody has both watched and loved this program — then when making a Facebook status update, you can select the “watching” option and allow the newly-implemented tech to automatically fill in the blanks.
If you decide to share your current music track, friends will be able to enjoy a 30-second preview, and, we presume, there’ll also be an option to download via a third-party service. And if you’re a bit of a TV buff, you’ll be pleased to know that season and episode numbers are also specified when sharing, allowing you and your friends to avoid those dreaded spoilers.
If you don’t want this feature, you’ll be pleased to know that it’s opt-in rather than automatically applied, but nevertheless, if you’re in the business of sourcing and sharing new content, then it’s almost certainly an enhancement to your overall Facebook experience.
According to the press release, the new feature will roll out to folks in the US “in the coming weeks,” and yes, it will be compatible with both iOS and Android devices. There’s no word, as per usual, on if or when this feature will become available to those on Windows Phone, and as such, we suspect that it could be quite a long time before users of Microsoft’s platform get to enjoy these features.
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