Turntable.fm was one of those websites that I signed up for and then promptly forgot about within a week. I'm sure I have tens, maybe even hundreds of empty shells of accounts hanging around the internet at sites like these. They seem really neat for about two to four days, then you realize there isn't much to them and go off to do more important things, like play platformers on Kongregate for approximately 20 hours straight. Or, you know, go to work or sleep or what have you.

 

But Turntable evidently got enough attention for Facebook to start mimicking it. Seems sort of posthumous--I feel like Turntable lost its novelty a while back when all the internet hipsters turned to Spotify on Facebook for their shared listening experiences. Nevertheless, Facebook will soon be introducing a new level of social music, uncreatively entitled Listening With Friends.

 

Looks like LWF will be able to latch on to Spotify's shared notifications, or those of any other Facebook-incorporated streaming services. Play a song, and any of your friends linked in to your Spotify account will be able to listen right along with you. You can invite online friends to hop on to your listening session, creating a little musical hangout with whoever happens to be plugged in at the time.

 

I'm not sure I'm buying it as an actual threat to what audience Turntable has left. Just like Facebook Questions didn't thin out the roving masses that use Yahoo! Answers as their central source of everyday knowledge, a communal listening feature isn't going to cut away at the appeal of Turntable.fm. For one, there doesn't seem to be any sort of game component on Listening With Friends. I don't think you can give the thumbs-up or thumbs-down to your friend's DJing skills, and you can't accumulate points. Also there are no collectable avatars, and that was at least 63% of the fun of Turntable.fm. Facebook just seems to be opening up their streams to users' friends. That means the next time you see that your friend listened to that Bon Iver album for the seventieth time, you can actually participate instead of idly watching it slink down your news feed. Revolutionary? Not particularly, no. But neither was the inclusion of streaming notifications on Facebook, and yet people seem more than happy to share what they're adding to their playlists, even if all anyone can do with it now is "like" it or comment on it. So at least they're adding a buddy factor to that whole crossover.