Multiple sources earlier today were reporting on a new Facebook Meesenger feature that allows users to easily share songs and playlists from Spotify. This is a new feature? I have conversations in Facebook Messenger from four years ago that are integrated with Spotify’s messaging features.
Okay, so maybe it is a new feature for the Facebook Messenger mobile apps, but why is it executed so poorly? The feature is buried within a menu to view more options in a conversation. How often do people bother to look at those options? Sending music is straightforward which is great. Just type what you are looking for and hit send. Opening the messages is trickier than it needs to be however.
Album artwork is on full display when a message is sent. It looks nice, but it is just an image. Tapping on the artwork enlarges it instead of launching the Spotify app. Users need to press the button that says open to listen to the song. I guess that makes sense, but it is such a small area to tap. Good luck trying to listen to music on your computer, that button is missing entirely.
What happened? It seems like a glaring oversight to reduce functionality in a desktop browser. The messages I sent from Spotify four years ago have the songs sent as links in my Facebook inbox and can be opened on just about any device. This should be the case with the feature that just rolled out.
I shared a song to someone on my Facebook friend list using the Spotify desktop client tonight. The song did not appear in his Facebook inbox. Maybe that functionality was removed like most of the other Spotify related features on Facebook. What happened to the music notes next to names on Facebook Messenger to let you know when they were listening to music? How about that Open Graph app that tracked listening activity? Actually, that doesn’t matter since it was an inferior version of Last.fm.
Laneous Missile 