Imagine: You’re on the road, and want to hear some new tunes. There’s nothing good on the radio. So you fire up Ford SYNC® and say, “Just Play.” SYNC activates the “Just Play” app. It links to your Facebook profile and starts spinning your friends’ fave tunes—all of which are stored on Spotify, one of the web’s most popular music players. Problem solved. And, if you get bored with one of your friend’s jams, you can just use the “skip” button on your steering wheel to groove to the taste of another pal.

This could happen sooner than you think. “Just Play” was just one of the new apps some innovative (and supervised) developers cooked up at a recent, 24-hour hackathon at the Facebook campus in Palo Alto. The event produced a bunch of cool features, and we asked the Ford Social community to vote on their favorite. “Just Play” was the clear winner.

“The idea is for it to be really simple,” says Julius Marchwicki, Project Manager for Ford SYNC, who saw the app unveiled and loved it. “It’s a super-interesting way of socializing music. It went beyond the traditional ways you listen.”

It didn’t come easy. The developers—Stefan Bankowski from Ford and Matt Jones and Ravi Grover from Facebook— ran into challenges getting SYNC to access Spotify’s internal code. But thanks to some creative thinking, they got past the obstacles and made something truly original.

There are no immediate plans to release “Just Play” for consumer use just yet, but it’s a great reminder of one thing that makes SYNC® technology so exciting: You can get new apps just by downloading them to your phone.

“A typical customer will change his or her phone three times before changing a vehicle,” Julius says. “The way I look at it is, with tech like SYNC, people can update the way they interact with their vehicles without having to change their cars.”

And Julius is always open to new concepts. “There is definitely more that we can do with SYNC,” he says. “We’re just starting to scratch the surface.”

Facebook integration, GPS navigation, and voice recognition software open the door to a lot of possibilities. That’s why we want to hear from you. Do you have an idea about how we can take SYNC to the next level? Tell us about it today!