On the 27th of April 2010 Spotify announced “Spotify – the next generation“. They started rolling out Spotify version 0.4.3 which included the largest feature upgrade since the launch in 2008. In this blog post I look more into the social features that they launched. The features are according to the Spotify blog post:
“..centered on a fully editable Spotify music profile, with the ability to publish playlists, top artists and top tracks for public view. Discovering these profiles is simple as we’ve connected with Facebook so that you can instantly add your friends’ profiles“.
This is cool. I tried it out, but I was surprised about their implementation of the Facebook integration. in this blog post I´ll describe what I think is some weakness with this implementation, and would love to get some dialog/comments from you. Maybe it´s only me that thinks it´s a problem?
Connecting to Facebook
The first thing is to connect to Facebook. In the new Spotify you´ve got a profile located in the right column. The profile typically consists of your playlists (that is published) and your top artists and top tracks. All your friends on Facebook will be able to see this as default (but is possible to change). There are two ways to log into Facebook from Spotify. You may use the menu at your profile at the top right. Or you may choose to click on the bottom right button asking you to import your friends.
Choosing to connect to Facebook will prompt you to log in to your Facebook account (E-mail and Password). This is done through a new window inside Spotify. After you log in to your account on Facebook, you will have the following options:
What Spotify asks for is the following (to be able to connect Spotify to Facebook you must accept this )
- access to your information on Facebook (name, picture, list of friends etc)
- access to your wall (for posting of messages etc )
- acces to your news feed
- offline acces to your account (when you are not using Spotify)
Spotify takes full control over your wall
What happens when you accept? Well, go to Facebook and look at your profile. Spotify automatically posts to your wall that you have just activated Facebook for Spotify making it easier to find friends’ Spotify playlists. This is done without asking me. In my opinion this is a weakness with Spotify´s integration with Facebook. Spotify takes away my control over my own wall on Facebook. What they should have done, was to alert me that they where about to post to my wall, and let me choose not to do so if I did not want that information out. Another issue with this, is that everytime you disconnect Facebook from Spotify and connect again, this information is posted to your wall. Kind of make me feel like a big time spammer actually. Here is how it looks like:
When connected to Spotify my friends on Facebook that has also connected their account to Spotify appears in a list. Now you are able to dive into each of them and look at their profiles and information as described above. I found a published playlist from one of my friends and subscribed to it. What do you think is happening now? Well, let´s go over to my Facebook profile again. On my wall a new post from Spoitify has appeared. The action of subsribing to a playlist is announced on my wall. Again this is done without any warning or information. If you really work with your friends playlist, subsrcribe to many of them, I bet you will get a bit frustrated when looking at your Facebook wall seeing all your actions there.
For each action I should have been prompted with a question letting me decide to post or not. Here is how this post on my wall looks like:
Working with the settings
Since Spotify have no functionality that let us have control over what is actually posted to the wall – playing the “all or nothing” game, I have chosen to restrict Spotify´s access to my profile. You may do this in two ways. The easiest one is to just to disable the postings to Facebook inside the profile settings in Spotify. The other option is to go to your Facebook account, choosing Spotify from the application settings, and uncheck the Spotify´s ability to access your wall.
I really hope Spotify develops the functionality that let me choose from action to action what I will post on my wall. The implementation today is not user-friendly as far as I see this, but of course from Spotify´s view of it, it is a sneaky way to go viral on Facebook.
Seems hard to disagree. Seems someone didn’t ask their users first…?
I think the integration with Facebook is really cool, but lacks basic control from a users perspective. But maybe users don´t care…
Hm, I do think users care. I just don’t check my own profile that often and didn’t know that Spotify was abusing their access to my wall. Thx for bringing my attention to this.
Hans
PS! If you select “Remove” from your wall, you can select the option “Don’t allow Spotify to publish without asking me”. This is probably the easiest way to stop this from happening again.
Hi Hans! Thanks for your comment. You are probably right. I actually did not see my wall before I had a lot of posts from Spotify (deleted some of them when I saw them though). Kicked me into writing this short post.
I did try that function, and it worked fine (Spotify is not any longer posting to the wall). Let´s hope they just add the functions necessary for letting us have the control.
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Also, I log into facebook with firefox and my wife logs in with internet explorer. For some reason it ask permission using my facebook, but it connected with her facebook name and posts to her account. Any way to unassociate spotify with a facebook account and reassociate it?
Hi, Jerms.
Sure, it is simple to revoke the access that an application has. Just go to the Account Settings, and then Application Settings (on http://www.facebook.com). For each application that is granted permission you are able to revoke it. I think that will solve your problem.
I can’t seem to disable the wall posting on my wall, i just signed up for a spotify acct, and had opted yes to share it on my wall as setting up the account. But now i can’t change it. Tried to remove the spotify on fb app, but everytime i logged in it always reset or reinstall the app. I tried to delete the spotify comment on the wall but it keeps showing as i’m playing a different song, and there’s no option to let it not publish it again like you have mentioned.
I wonder if i’m not doing this right or they have changed their system
thanks!
Hi ap.
Have you tried to just revoke access and not delete the app?
Sorry that I am not able to help you out here. I have seen an increase in vists last two days on my blog (this post). Looks like you are not the only one with problems reagarding the Facebook/Spotify wall postings.
It appears that Spotify now (within the last couple days) requires you to allow it to post to your wall. If you decline, it logs you out of spotify. In other words, “Hey, we’re giving you a free service, the least you can do is let us clutter your wall with spam! Without telling you!”
Hi Andy, thanks for stopping by my blog!
If you open preferences in Spotify, you should be able to uncheck the boxes under your profile (Automatically publish new playlists, Top tracks, Top Artists). This may stop the spamming on the Facebook wall (?)
Also on my application settings for Spotify on facebook.com I am able to easily revoke access to my wall for the Spotify application.
I am not sure how this is related to paid/non-paid Spotify-service.
Hello, great blog entry by the way! I earlier today checked my Facebook profile wall and noticed the Spotify feed items. Searching for options to reduce Spotify presence on my profile brought me to this blog entry.
Upon closer inspection of my Facebook wall I noticed one thing that Facebook does and has done for practicality even before the emergence of Spotify is collapse together identical/similar news feed items. My Spotify listening record was collapsed under a “Show similar stories” link that would expand upon a mouse click and show all of the grouped Spotify news items.
This allows the news item ticker to tick away at all my Spotify listens but my average Facebook friend is not going to care much for seeing my Spotify items under the “Top stories since your last visit”. As long as Facebook maintains this divide between the multiple different types of news feeds, I’m all for putting Spotify on an impulsive ticker that most people don’t pay attention to.
Again, great blog entry! Discussing the products we all use every day is an important part of being a consumer.
Hi Brenly!
Thanks for your comment. This blog entry is a bit old now, written way back in 2010. But it seems that it got even more relevant after the even tighter integration between Spotify and Facebook was released. But as you mention, Facebook has done some clever development related to the collapsing of elements!