Go Beyond Ticker, Use Facebook Music Dashboard To See What Your Friends Listen To

After yesterday’s announcement of its expanded Open Graph capabilities, Facebook has been sharing your music listening activity over its News Ticker, allowing for music discovery and the realization that as TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington put it, “A lot of you have just really terrible taste in music.”

Well, in case you want to further delve into your friends’ terrible music taste, Facebook has just launched its Music Dashboard as a permanent bookmark in your profile’s left side bar.  Inside Facebook’s Josh Constine points out that you can access it and dock it on your sidebar by clicking through to a friend’s Playlist or through this direct link here.

Right now the Music Dashboard shows you what songs your friends are listening to — aggregating friend listening patterns by band–  as well as Top Songs and something called Featured Music Services which for me at least is currently advertising Earbits and Spotify.

While it seems like you must have at least one music playing partner app to listen to music through Dashboard, one of its coolest and most seamless features is that if you click on a song from a music player you don’t currently have Facebook gives you the, albiet mitigated, option to listen to it in your preferred player.

Of course because it’s Facebook you can like or comment on user music listening activity, and also judge your friends on their song selections because, as we all know, Dave Matthews is lame. But, before you judge too harshly, please keep in mind the serious serious issue with all this music integration …

As Philip Kaplan notes, “The problem with this Spotify integration is that I end up clicking a lot of friends’ terrible selections (out of curiosity) and then it looks like they’re *my* pics :(.”

So, yeah, be care before you click on your old college roommate’s update that they’re listening to the Divinyls “I touch myself.” Openness is a double-edged sword.