Spotify has announced its next step toward digital music streaming domination with a major upgrade that includes some brand new social features that have got a lot of people very excited.

The service now allows you to connect it to your Facebook account, pull in your friends who are also on Spotify, and generate a  profile that includes your favourite tracks, artists and your playlists.

It’s now very easy to publish your Spotify profile to your Facebook page or your blog, send tracks to friends within the service (a simple drag and drop), see music that your friends have posted on Facebook, track changes in playlists, and add people to your friends list through their Spotify username.

In a move that takes it squarely into iTunes territory,  you can also now import links to your own music files stored on your hard-drive, rate them, sync them to mobile and play them all through Spotify.

This is an obvious, but smart move by Spotify, and one that seems to have been executed with the usual slick user-experience that typifies the service.

And they are perfectly clear about its ambitions – to be not just a music streaming service, but to evolve into a “total music management platform”. If these features are anything to go by, Spotify may be becoming just that.

Neil Perkin is the founder of Only Dead Fish, and you can read his blog here.