So I'm not the only one that saw, "The 'Listen with your friend' feature in ticker is blowing my mind. Listen to what your friends are listening. LIVE." and thought, "Why does that impress anybody that much?" Sure, the details are probably technically interesting, but I don't see how this is mind-blowing in any way. (Of course, I'm also over 40, so maybe my reaction is not surprising.)

Is this just marketing hype, or do people genuinely get that worked up about things like this?

I guess it's horses for courses - but I do agree with you that it seems rather bland. I much prefer something like last.fm where I can listen to tracks that others with similar tastes to me are listening to.

Listening to the same thing as your friends right now makes a great demo, increases time on Facebook.com, and is a first step in gathering new data that can be associated with facebook uid's.

Once Facebook has the data for what every person in the world (already close to 1 billion active users) listens to at all times (via FB Connect) then an entire ecosystem will emerge from this data set and the graph API alone.

It might even save last.fm, if they can build something compelling on top of that data.

I think this is one of those things that sounds cool when you first hear it but don't end up using much. I think one effective use of this would be to introduce someone to a song. I'm not sure that a group of people will be sitting listening to one playlist.