Apple Releases “Ping”, A New Social Networking Feature For iTunes

Just the other day, whilst I was listening to my new favorite song “I Like That” by the Static Revengers on my iPhone, it occurred to me that Apple has dabbled in most forms of electronic media, but has yet done much of anything with social networking. That has changed.

Today an update to iTunes and the iPhone was released that paved the way for Apple “change everything…again.” It’s called Ping, and it utilizes some functionality of Apple’s recent acquisition, Lala.com. It basically operates like Facebook in many ways, only with a focus on music. For example, any music you buy, like, review, or comment on will show up in your recent activity.

It’s really a great start, but there are a few things I would add. First, the ability to add friends, or “follow” them, is limited to typing in their e-mail address or name. It works, but not as well as many sites who utilize Facebook or Twitter Connect to find the friends you already have. I have no interest in going through all 1500 of my friends to figure out who I want to add, then figure out if they have an email address. I also feel like the ability to add what song you are currently listening to into your feed from your iPhone screen. That may come with future updates, however.

Also included in the new update was a new app called Game Center, though I haven’t had a chance to really look at that yet.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 8th, 2010 at 5:21 pm and is filed under Music, Technology, Topics, Trends. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.