If Facebook Can't Change How You Discover Music In 2013, It's Time To Question Zuckerberg's Grand Vision

In 2012, Facebook integrated third-party music services iHeart, Deezer and Spotify into the Timeline on user profiles and the News Feed.

In 2013, Facebook wants to organize that data and present it to users in a way that changes how people discover new music.

Facebook manager of strategic partnerships Ime Archibong told Billboard about the company's plans in a Q&A published yesterday.

Of 2013, he said:

We'll dive in and try to solve the issue of discovery. We're now leaning into the idea that we can be a destination for social music activity and discovery. In the past, Facebook.com/music was just an aggregated view of what friends were listening to. In the last couple of months, we added status messages from artists that they liked, as well as conversations from friends around music. That destination, along with the News Feed, is what we'll think more about in 2013. We want to add more pieces of context to let people tell rich, engaging stories around music.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's long-term vision for Facebook is that it will help other industries leverage the "social graph" to their profit, and then collect some sort of tax on the value it creates.

So far, Facebook has only done this for the social gaming industry.

And that's fizzled a bit. See: Zynga.

If Archibong and his team can't reach some of their goals for 2013, it may be time to start wondering if Facebook is much of a platform at all, and not just a fancy replacement for Webmail.

(Some people have already started wondering this, thanks to how badly Facebook's Snapchat-clone, Poke, flopped.)