Facebook launched its new Skype-powered video chatting service last week, and at the launch founder Mark Zuckerberg promised that it was just the first in a series of high-profile feature launches due in the coming weeks from the social network.
A music service integrated with Facebook - possibly powered by London and Stockholm-based music streaming service Spotify, as has been rumoured in the past - was widely believed to be a likely candidate for one of those launches.
And now software engineer Jeff Rose has uncovered evidence of Facebook's upcoming music service - hidden in the code for the video chat download.
Rose writes on his Life Is A Graph blog that he examined the code for the plugin Facebook users need to download in order to use video chat, and discovered the following lines:
'Peep' refers to the video chat service, but the other lines are about something called 'Vibes' - which apparently will launch a dialogue box referred to as 'MusicDownloadDialog'.
That appears to confirm that a Facebook Music service is indeed imminent - although it's unlikely to actually be called 'Vibes'. The video chat service isn't called 'Peep', after all, and Facebook don't tend to use anything other than the most prosaic names for their features. Also, Vibes would just be a dreadful name.
It also raises questions about what form the music service will take. Does the reference to a 'download' suggest that, rather than a Spotify-style streaming service, Facebook will be offering actual downloads of music files? It's possible - indeed, it wouldn't rule out a Spotify collaboration, as it also offers a full download store - but it could simply refer to the need for software to be downloaded in order for the service to work.
That would make sense - the Skype software needed for the video chat also needs to be downloaded, and Spotify currently requires its dedicated software client to work. But if it did mean that Facebook was getting into the music downloads market, it could prove to be major competition for Apple's iTunes and Amazon.
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