The listen feature will works in both individual and group settings. Those friends listening to music will show a music note beside their name. Initially Spotify, Mog, and Rdio are supported, although Facebook says other services are on their way.

Making it a more social experience, those who also click the “Listen” button will be added into a group chat where everyone can discuss what they’re listening to. Of course there are privacy concerns, and Facebook has provided instructions to control that if you so desire.

Facebook doesn’t yet allow you to switch DJs like Turntable.fm allows. I’m willing to bet that the feature will come soon if Facebook is truly is serious about competing with already existing services, however.

Has anyone used this yet? What are your thoughts? Let us know in the comments.

(!–more–>

You may not realize you’re even being hit with an ad unless you read the timestamp closely: Facebook marks the sponsored post as “featured”. Rolling over the tag shows the text “You are seeing this because you like (insert company name). A sponsor paid to place it here”.

Other types of Sponsored Stories allow advertisers to hit up your friends even though they may not like the page, but this type will not. Facebook is smart enough to realize that sticking an ad in the face of somebody who may not care to see it wouldn’t be such a smart idea.

According to Inside Facebook, which looks to be the first to find out about the new ads, the social networking company is performing a gradual rollout. Initially the sponsored news feed posts will be limited to one per day, and won’t be shown on mobile devices. It’s not clear where Facebook plans to take the sponsored stories from there, though.

Either way, I’m not happy about this. My news feed is to find out about the things I care about, not to be pestered with ads. Add to this the fact that it may not be clear that they are ads, and it really bothers me. The only reason Facebook is doing this is because these ads will be worth a lot of money, and on top of that likely have a higher click-through rate as a result of their prominence.

Where does it end?

Facebook acknowledged there was a glitch in the system, which allowed users to access off-limit photos of other users, but claimed that only a limited number of users were affected. Facebook did not disclose how many people were affected.

Many users have their Facebook profile locked down. Only profile picture data is often available to display on some profiles. Users who took advantage of this flaw were able to ‘report’ a profile picture as ‘nudity or pornography’, which then led to the ‘reporting’ tool to display the images.

However, images of Facebook chief executive and founder Mark Zuckerberg were uploaded to image-sharing sites after his own profile was exploited.

Google+’s best shot at success involves it becoming indistinguishable from Google. Instead of being a place, it can be the social glue that ties together Google’s search engine, Gmail, Google Apps, and scads of other services that hundreds of millions of people already use. If Google figures out how to make its whole dang world feel like a Facebook competitor, it’ll be a big deal.

Code-named “Buffy,” after the television vampire slayer, the phone is planned to run on a modified version of Android that Facebook has tweaked heavily to deeply integrate its services, as well as to support HTML5 as a platform for applications, according to sources familiar with the project.

 
Facebook is in an interesting position when it comes to phones. Apple has deeply integrated Twitter into iOS 5. Google, which clearly sees Facebook as its primary archrival, is unlikely to make Facebook support core to the off-the-shelf version of Android. So I can see why Facebook might want a phone of its very own…

If your friends are using an app like The Guardian or The Washington Post’s new Social Reader, you’ll get an intercept asking you to authorize the original site’s app so that you can read the story. And, of course, so that every story you read will start being shared automatically on Facebook, thanks to the magic of Open Graph!

I try to withhold a verdict on any Facebook change for a bit–in the past, some that have been jarring at first turn out to be great, or at least okay. But I do agree that it’s disorienting to get the install-this-app prompt when you thought you were clicking on an article. And the fact that I want to read one Washington Post story doesn’t mean I want all my Facebook pals to know about every Washington Post story I read forever after.

It may take a lot of effort to make Facebook hum, but it doesn’t take a lot of people on site in Prineville. The 333,400-square foot facility has tens of thousands of servers–Facebook would prefer not to get any more specific than that–but it takes only 55 people to run it, about half of whom are involved in security. (On the other hand, the construction project created 1400 temporary jobs.) Still, the arrival of a Silicon Valley giant has had a big impact on Prineville, a small community smack-dab in the middle of Oregon in an area once called “the Tibet of North America,” and until recently best known as the former headquarters of the Les Schwab tire-store empire.

Our tour was led by Ken Patchett, the Prineville site manager, and a veteran of data centers operated by Google, Microsoft, and Compaq. Here are some photographic highlights; you’ll see him in a couple of the pictures.

Behold the napkin where the idea that became the Prineville data center was first sketched out.

Patchett stressed to us that it’s crucial that Facebook and Prineville form a bond, so that nobody in town perceives the social-networking giant as an interloper from the big city. The Prineville facility is full of vintage photos of local citizens, such as these gents posing with Old Scout, an Oldsmobile that was the first car to reach the area.

A modern item of Prineville memorabilia: A Facebook quilt made by quilters at the Prineville Senior Center, showing how Facebook connects the world.

Our tour included a visit to a wall which traced the entire history of communications. It began with cave paintings, hieroglyphics, and the Rosetta Stone and ended with–you guessed it–Facebook. (Patchett compared his employer to both a clay tablet and a mix tape during his walkthrough.)

Here’s a giant Like button, created for the grand opening of the Prineville facility..

Press it, and it lights up!

The data center has a fine gnome garden..

A close-up of the servers that stores content from Facebook. Your profile could be right here.

The simplified, streamlined servers built using the Open Compute Project design that originated at Facebook are designed to run cooler than traditional ones. In fact, the area around them is noticeably less sweltering than the one near the old-school severs. (The use of Open Compute servers helps the Prineville center use energy at about half the rate of a plain-vanilla data center–a feet that led to it receiving LEED Gold certification from the U.S. Green Building Council this week.)

The servers involved in financial transactions are caged off in a special limited-access area; Patchett says “we treat this like a bank.”

The servers are so reliable that the data center employees only four technicians to fix them. But when something does break down, they use these mobile repair carts. “Have you ever walked a half-mile to get a screwdriver?” says Patchett.

When the Prineville employees take a break, they can play games in a rec-room like area. (I don’t know whether it has anything to do with the fact that Microsoft owns a chunk of Facebook, but the space is outfitted with Xbox 360s.)

After the thousands and thousands of servers themselves, the second most impressive thing at Prineville is the amount of space and equipment devoted to keeping everything running cool, including a bank of ginormous fans, each the size of an industrial-strength clothes washer.

On the left of this area are louvers that move air around; on the right are vast numbers of air filters.

Here’s an enormous tank where water used in cooling is stored.

While the data center gets its power from the local utility company–there’s been some controversy over the fact that it’s mostly from coal–Facebook does maintain a bank of diesel-powered generators in trailers just in case.

Here are some solar panels–and if you squint, you can see construction going on in the background. It’s building #2, a carbon copy of the one I visited. And Facebook has enough land here to build building #3.

For a desert-like area, Prineville has a lush golf course–and Facebook is doing its part to keep it lush by donating water it uses to cool the data center once it’s done with it.

The Prineville data center is remarkable, but it’s only part of the Facebook data-center story. The company also has facilities in North Carolina and Virginia–and it recently unveiled plans to build one in Sweden–where the Arctic chill will provide a formidable source of natural cooling for all those servers.

As Business Insider reports, “Private Listening” disables Facebook’s new “Add to Timeline” feature, which automatically shares users’ listening habits with their Facebook friends. Private listening does nothing for people who haven’t opted into sharing with Add to Timeline, but for users who usually want to share, this option allows them to temporarily go dark.

Private listening may seem like a small tweak to pacify privacy paranoids, but it actually has important implications. Facebook assumes that everyone wants to share everything all the time. Or at least, Facebook is so confident in its vision that the company didn’t spend any time at last week’s f8 conference talking about how to disable sharing from within an app. Keeping things to yourself is not a concept that Facebook wants to promote.

But users have spoken–they don’t always want to share everything–so now Spotify is including an easy way to turn off the fire hose. I suspect that a lot of app developers will get around to adding similar features, especially when users’ activity can be a huge embarrassment. (See Mashable’s recent story about co-workers caught gawking at sexy celebrity photos and inadvertently telling all their Facebook friends about it.)

Ideally, Facebook will recognize that sometimes people need privacy, not necessarily to hide embarrassing behavior, but just to use the Internet without feeling like they’re being watched. I’d like to see Facebook add an option like Spotify’s Private Listening that works across all apps, so users can take a break from being out in the open. Doing so wouldn’t compromise Facebook’s vision. It would strengthen that vision by giving people the knowledge that they can still hang on to their privacy while embracing Facebook’s new features.

Over at Cult of Mac, Mike Elgan is warning Apple that Facebook is a threat to its dominance of digital entertainment:

Facebook will enable the discovery, sharing, buying and renting of movies and TV shows via Netflix, Hulu, Blockbuster, IMDB, Dailymotion and Flixter.

And just as the iPad is gaining traction as the electronic newspaper of choice, Facebook announces partnerships with the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Slate, the Associated Press, Reuters, Yahoo News and others to make Facebook the default online newspaper site.

Facebook is now more directly threatening to Apple’s business model than Microsoft, Google and Sony combined.

Mike is right that if Facebook’s new media-consumption and -sharing features could start to steal customers away from Apple. And he has a solution in mind: Apple needs to build its own social network. Something way better than Ping, which doesn’t seem to have changed iTunes that much, let alone the world.

If Apple were to come up with a cool social network, it would be…cool! But I fret that it’s not in the company’s nature to wade too deeply into the messy, unruly pool of user-generated content. Apple likes things perfect, not social. And an Apple that was great at social networking might not be so hot at all the things Apple is already so good at.

Besides, I’m not sure if we really need another social network, unless it’s transcendently better than the major ones we’ve got–Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and LinkedIn. I’m already on all of ‘em, and don’t really have time to wrangle the same friends in yet another place.

So what I’d really like to see is Apple enthusiastically supporting the big existing social networks. If you could share what you’re listening to and watching–and maybe even the apps you’re installing and using–via iTunes on Facebook, Facebook wouldn’t represent a threat to Apple. It would be one more way to keep Apple customers happy and find new ones.

There’s at least one hint that Apple is thinking in this general direction: iOS 5 includes baked-in Twitter support, letting you Tweet from within several of Apple’s applications. But YouTube appears to be the only media-related one. That makes sense: It’s a repository of free content, while iTunes is for paid stuff. If Apple were to really get gung ho about social networking, it would have to figure out what it means to share a piece of content that isn’t a freebie.

iOS 5 will likely be out in a matter of days. That means there’s roughly another year until the next major iOS upgrade is due. That gives Apple time to think further about how its products and services should relate to the social networks its customers use. I hope it does so–it’s an opportunity with both less risk and more potential than building Yet Another Social Network.