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Digital Top Stories
Apple add social networking to iTunes with a Ping
By CMU Editorial | Published on Thursday 2 September 2010
Although the underlying theme of Steve Jobs’ latest moment in the spotlight was “look how great we’re doing everybody, and I’m not dead, that’s a bonus”, probably the most significant announcement actually made at last night’s Apple press call in San Francisco, for music people at least, was the addition of social networking functionality to the latest incarnation of iTunes.
Along with a rather rubbish new logo (not that the old logo was any better), iTunes 10 will come with a networking element called Ping which will enable artists and users to have profile pages through which they can post updates, reviews and music tips. Other users can then choose to follow artists and friends and use their postings to discover new artists, songs and music.
Described by Jobs as “sort of like Facebook and Twitter meet iTunes”, the new functionality makes Apple’s music software and download store a more direct competitor to services like start-up mflow and, possibly, MySpace Music, which has also tried to combine elements of recommendation, preview and purchase.
Both mflow and MySpace have an advantage over Apple in this regard though, in that they enable users to preview to any song tipped by a friend in full (once only on mflow, as many times as you like on MySpace) whereas Apple only offer their customary and pretty useless thirty second clips.
There would be big licensing implications if Apple were to go the full track preview route of course, though if the much talked about iTunes streaming service ever came to fruition, it could be used to offer more user-friendly previews.
Other innovations in the latest incarnation of iTunes include quasi-TV on demand, better syncing and wireless functionality. The latest version of Apple’s music programme is accompanied by a wide-ranging revamp of the iPod range, all of which will be redesigned in one way or another.
