Facebook has announced that it will be working towards incorporating music and film into user’s newstreams thereby deeply integrating the entertainment forms into the social network. This is another step closer to turning Facebook into a one stop hub for people online. The integration will be achieved through the creation of a ‘ticker’ stream that will be featured directly on Facebook’s homepage.
The new feature will be revealed at the f8 conference in San Francisco alongside other updates from fellow major media outlets. The ticker will be unveiled as part of a ‘read, watch and listen’ themed presentation that Mark Zuckerberg will give on the 22 September.
Mark Zuckerberg will announce a series of further changes at the f8 conference including updates to the ‘Like’ button function such as letting developers change the verb to alternatives such as want, desire or need. The new film and music steam is also expected to incorporate feeds from selected newspapers. Many of these updates come after Facebook revealed that following the inclusion of more tools for external sites last year the social network saw its traffic increase fourfold.
Recently Facebook has been offering a lot more to its users and has attracted an additional 250,000 over the past year. Many believe that the changes, such as the choice to only share some status updates with friends, either mimic or are trying to match up to Google+. However some commentators have made the observation that if Facebook continues to over complicate its interface it will lose the one feature that makes it unique, simplicity.
