Mark Smith, via USA TODAY, notes the recent shift in your news feed is a result of the clustering of alike sharing content based on what your friends are consuming. If two friends listen to a song on Spotify that you also listened to, a larger news feed item appears.
Facebook is hoping this sort of information furthers its role as a recommendation engine. By grouping all this data together, Facebook users can get a sorted look at the media consumption habits of their closest friends.
So, if you don’t listen to a song but three others do, Facebook effectively recommends a song because it takes the sharing data and clumps it together. The result:
That could be a powerful proposition for both users and Facebook, which would hope to deliver relevant advertising alongside that information.
Facebook also has privacy controls for these services, but you can pretty much guarantee that they will be set to “lenient” when this becomes a bigger part of the social network:
For each of the Web services that integrate with the Facebook Ticker, the user must explicitly approve that their viewing or listening habits be broadcast. Users can also limit that information to certain groups of friends.