Music Hackathon- Collaborative Playlists
At Facebook we have a strong culture of hackathons. The idea is that any group of people should be able to set aside a few days, and try to flesh out an concept that doesn't have to do with the things that they normally work on. Last week at Hack 60, a handful of us from The Factory joined forces with some kickass interns to build a prototype for a product called, “Collaborative Playlists.”
Creative Director: James Anderson
Product Producer: Nicholas Blair
Judges Choice Award Winner
The Idea
Friendships are formed through common interest in artists and genres, so they can surely be strengthened by discovering those common interests existed all along. James Anderson, a Product Designer on our team, had been mulling over the idea of making music discovery a truly shared experience, so that we can bring people on Facebook closer together and create utility at the same time. Hack 60 was the perfect opportunity to bring this idea to fruition.
While Spotify allows you to make collaborative playlists on the platform, it relies on a lot of prompting on the user's part in order to engage with friends and request submissions to a playlist. As a result, most music discovery on the platform comes in the form of top charts, or algorithmic playlists, that know the music you listen to, but don't know you like your friends do. Our goal was to leverage the community of friends we have on Facebook to create a channel through which people can easily and meaningfully interact over music.
The Product
At it's core, Collaborative Playlists is "Facebook Recommendations for Songs". A user can kick off a playlist by creating a Collaborative Playlist post on Facebook, and friends can recommended songs for you by commenting song suggestions on that post. The kicker is that the song suggestions that your friends comments are then automatically added to your linked Spotify Playlist.
Using the power of our friends, Facebook has the opportunity to expand music discovery to insights from real people, instead of an algorithm or chart. Collaborative playlists leverages our community and close connections to expand on content discovery for music in the same way that "looking for recommendations" has done for restaurants and coffee shops. Here’s the live demo we presented at the Prototype Forum.