Facebook just announced a new Listen With button in Facebook Chat. The button allows you listen to music with friends. Expect to see this new feature to start rolling out in the upcoming weeks.

Now you will be able to listen along with any of your friends who are currently listening to music. The same song at the exact same time. You can also listen in a group, so long as one of your friends is the “designated DJ.”

So how does it work? First you will need to look for a music note beside your friends’ name while using Facebook Chat. If you see that another friend listening to music, you can also listen in by hovering over their name, and clicking the Listen With button. The music will stream through the service your friend is using. (more…)

Facebook’s plan to weave various actions we take across the web into the social network via “frictionless” sharing is finally ready to be deployed, YourFacebookStuff has learned.

The remaining pieces of Facebook’s new Open Graph are in the final stages of testing and are nearing release. Facebook developers have been working quickly to validate partners and could turn on the latest element, Facebook Actions, any day now or, at the most, in a few weeks, a source familiar with the matter said.

The updated Open Graph, unveiled at Facebook’s f8 developer conference in September of 2011, is made up of three key elements: Timeline, Ticker and Actions. Now, it’s time for the world to be introduced to a whole new type of social sharing with Actions. (more…)

Think your programming skills are world class? Facebook is asking you to prove it at its second annual Hacker Cup challenge.

“Hacking is core to how we build at Facebook,” the company said in a blog post announcing this year’s competition. “Whether we’re building a prototype for a major product like Timeline at a Hackathon, creating a smarter search algorithm, or tearing down walls at our new headquarters, we’re always hacking to find better ways to solve problems.”

Open to coders anywhere in the world, the competition pits participants against each other in five rounds of programming challenges. Starting January 20 with a 72-hour qualification round. Three more online rounds will narrow the field to reveal the final 25 competitors, who will be flown out to Facebook’s Menlo Park, Calif., headquarters for a final competition in March. (more…)

Since the beginning of Facebook, the user profile has been the place where you tell your story. People use it to share everything from the small stuff, like their thoughts on an article, to the most important events of their lives, like the photos of their wedding or the birth of their child.

Over time, your profile evolved to better reflect how you actually communicate with your friends. Now you can can share photos of what you did last weekend, and updates about how you feel today.

But since the focus is on the most recent things you posted, more important stuff slips off the page. The photos of your graduation get replaced by updates about what you had for breakfast.

Say you’re catching up with an old friend – would you rather find out that they had eggs this morning, or hear about their new dream job? (more…)

Exact details are rather scarce, but Facebook will be launching a music service later this month. That’s right — Facebook may be about to unleash unlimited free music to all its users. Music is enjoyed almost universally, and free music services have been among the fastest-growing on the web — Napster, to name but one.

Facebook is partnering with top music services Spotify, MOG and Rdio to let users stream music on Facebook. Spotify is a service that lets you listen to virtually any song for free on your desktop, with the occasional, but infrequent, ad. Users can pay a small fee to remove the ads or use the service on their phones.

Though Facebook is the world’s most popular social networking service, with more than 750 million users, founder Mark Zuckerberg is keen to increase the amount of time users spend in the Facebook environment.

Music is said to be just one aspect of the strategy to improve Facebook’s “stickiness” and it is also expected to partner with other media content owners such as movie studios.

“They are working on a platform for music where the goal is to create a connective tissue for fans,” said one person familiar with the talks who asked not to be named as plans are confidential.

Facebook has declined to comment on its new music platform before, but in July several technology blogs reported a software engineer had uncovered programming code for a Facebook product called Vibes, for music downloading. (more…)