As soon as Apple made their string of announcements on 1st September 2010, I was straight onto iTunes trying to download the update. After a few hours of re-downloading iTunes 9, I managed to get the 10.0 update.I quickly set up my account and I was away.
Sometimes though, jumping the gun can have it’s pitfalls. There was no one there.What is this? Google Wave?Ah, Rick Rubin, I see you are on Ping, a quick follow and I received some very random musical preferences on my profile stream. Great, who else should I follow? Hmm… that looks good, recommendations based on your musical tastes and people you follow. Great! Who’s on there?
- U2? – I hate U2
- Katy Perry? – Can’t stand her!
- Linkin Park? – maybe, when I was 18!
Ok, I’m being a bit harsh. I should give it a week. A few days later, I found out that Weezer were creating a presence on Ping! The thing is, I found out about that on Twitter and Facebook.I can understand the premise behind Ping. I rarely open up iTunes, my music fix comes from We7 and Spotify. Can I be bothered to open iTunes all the time and suck my RAM dry? I can just open a browser.
Ping might make me more active on iTunes and therefore purchase more music.Let’s be honest though, what we really wanted from iTunes 10 was a browser based music service that stores all our music in the cloud. If we’re on the move, we can listen to that music on our iPods and iPhones but storage and management of our private database of music can and should be stored in the cloud. That won’t happen for a while but why act like Microsoft? Why slow down the Market? Take it forward in leaps and bounds! Be more like Google!We also want Facebook and Twitter integration. Ok, we get it, Ping is already accessible by 160 million people but that only just edges out Twitter and it’s vastly overshadowed by facebook.
They are too powerful to be toppled, they are too ingrained in society.Apple were a very early investor in the power of facebook, why not collaborate instead of taking them on? Unless Apple tried to collaborate with facebook and were denied? Only time will tell.In the meantime, I will be on Ping. I just probably won’t be as active as I am on Twitter and facebook!
