Facebook unveiled new ways for users to listen to music and watch TV, offering tie-ups with the likes of Spotify and Hulu, as it attempts to make media an integral part of its social networking service.
The features, which Facebook unveiled at its annual f8 developers' conference in San Francisco on Thursday, will vastly expand the types of activities that users of the social networking service can notify their friends about, from the news articles they read to the title of each song they listen to throughout the day.
Facebook users will also be able to listen along to whatever song a friend is listening to, provided they both subscribe to the supported third-party streaming music services, such as Spotify.
The media push comes as Facebook faces fresh competition from Google, which in June launched a rival social networking service, Google+. In recent weeks, Facebook, which counts more than 750 million users, has rolled out a bevy of changes to its service.
"Facebook is positioning itself as not just your social graph online, but your life online," said Forrester Research analyst Sean Corcoran.
"These changes not only help trump rival Google but will open up new opportunities," he said. "But concerns around privacy and immaturity in how to do these things effectively will make it a slow go."
Dressed in a gray T-shirt, jeans and sneakers, Zuckerberg said the music companies partnering with Facebook, including Rhapsody and Turntable.fm, were reinventing the music industry and the business models that underlie the industry.
"They believe that the key to making the music business work isn't trying to block you from listening to songs you haven't bought," said Zuckerberg.
"It's trying to help you discover so many songs that you end up buying even more content than you ever would have otherwise," he said.