ITunes Ping
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It finally happened. Apple has dived into musical social networking. It is called Ping and is taking off like a space shuttle. Read more on the new Ping and how it is multiples better than the way things were. Music artists and freinds are lumped in one bunch with the new Ping feature in iTunes. The older album pages have been spruced up with “like” and “post” buttons that make music more social. If you take a look at this new work from Apple and it seems to be a bit Facebookish, you are not alone in your thoughts. So what happens when you input a comment in the new Ping system ? It works a lot like Twitter or Facebook, to be quite honest. If you choose to comment on a song it goes to your account and to the accounts of those who are following you. It is also synched to iTunes in your computer. Essentially, it goes everywhere anyone would want to know. You can choose the levels you want to share your profile with before anything happens. It is possible to set the Ping service to be followed by anyone, to approve followers, or to never be followed. You will need to have itunes 10.0.1 for the Ping update to take effect. There is now no more need to have to look up a song on iTunes to share it with the rest of the world. Most likely, you already have the songs you like. Now just use Ping to share them from your own library. A button is next to every song in the personal iTunes library. This is the button to use to share a song with your followers. The Ping button will show up next to highlighted songs. Selecting this button will cause a menu to appear that features the “like”, “share” “post”, or see the profile of the artist. This opens up the genre, songs, albums and other information on the artist’s profile. When you post a song, it is possible to post a comment with the song for all to read. If you are listening to a song, you can share it with all your followers to see. All the above is also being shared by your friends with you if you have iTunes. There is a “ping stream” that shows all the activities of those who are in your field of contact. If you are wondering if there are enough people to share Ping with, simply take a look at the amount of people accessing Ping. It may not be as high as Facebook, but 160 million people is still a huge number of people to share music with. That is around half of all the people in the United States. It is assumed that this network will be joined up with Facebook and Twitter for a truly worldly presence. Facebook has yet to make music sociable. This may be their chance, thanks to Apple and itunes. It will be interesting to see them try and be friends on the level of sharing music. The only problem with the Ping setup is that there is plenty of music not on the Ping platform yet. Perhaps it will be added soon, and be a more complete setup. | |