Facebook® Application Development For Dummies®

Pandora

In 2010, Pandora (www.pandora.com) announced its own integration with Facebook's Graph API, as one of its initial launch partners for the new API. The idea of the integration was to allow Pandora's users to be able to listen to music that their friends and family like, integrating those elements into the already-brilliant music recommendation engine. (See Figure 17-3.)

Figure 17-3: Pandora lets me see what my friends are listening to.

Pandora's integration is very simple:

• Pandora allows you to see your “Friends' Music.” Clicking this gives you the option to authenticate with Facebook. When you do, you're immediately presented with a list of your friends on Facebook who use Pandora.
• Pandora uses what your friends are listening to in order to suggest stations to you. If you surf through your Facebook friends, you can see their recent music activity as well as other interests. It also appears that Pandora might pull in information from a user's likes and interests on his or her Facebook profile (but it's unclear whether that's the case).
• As you're listening, you can also see which of your friends are listening. A little bubble appears under each song that shows which of your friends like that song.

That's basically it, but it's very powerful to be able to see the music that your friends are listening to and listen to music that others close to you also like. It's a unique ...