London: Facebook has outlined plans to encourage users to share more of the media they consume including music,movies and news with friends.
Its founder Mark Zuckerberg also unveiled a dramatic redesign to the website, replacing user profiles with an audio visual timeline of their life.
The updates were revealed at Facebook’s annual F8 developer conference.
A wave of new features in recent weeks have been welcomed by some users and caused annoyance to many others.
Facebook’s latest changes point to a desire to keep users engaged through new features, in the midst of rapid innovation from social networking rivals.
The site’s application platform has been redesigned to allow users to share what they are consuming on streaming music services such as Spotify, and the movie rental site Netflix.
News sites, including the Guardian and Independent newspapers, are also included in the initial roll out.
Depending on privacy settings, users will be able to see what friends are doing – for example, playing a song – then listen-in themselves.
Mr Zuckerberg said he wanted to create, what he called, “real time serendipity”.
“Being able to click on someone’s music is a great experience, but knowing you helped a friend discover something new and they liked your taste in music, and that you now have that in common is awesome,” he added.
Facebook said that users would only be able to do as much on the site as its media partners allowed in each country, so free music sharing through streaming apps would only work where that service was already available outside Facebook.
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