Tech Blog

[#1]

While the buzz earlier this week was all speculation about hardware changes and improvements, today Steve Jobs and Apple snuck in a potentially great enhancement to the iTunes ecosphere -- a little thing called Ping .

Basically, Ping is Facebook for iTunes. It lives in iTunes, but lets you ‘get social’ with your media.

Ping Feature LIst:

• Social music discovery
• Follow and be followed
• Circle of friends
• Post you thoughts and opinions
• Custom song & album charts
• Over 17,000 concert listings
• 160 million iTunes users in 23 countries

The big and exciting feature for me, is that Ping integrates into your iOS 4 device...that means you will have some Ping functionality on your iPod, iPhone and iPad. Can’t wait to check out the details on this.

And yes, if you’re familiar with the way most social media networks work, you’ll be quite at-home in iTunes Ping.

Ping, as part of the newly released  iTunes, will be available today.

[#2]

Wait... So this is different than PingChat, correct?  Did Apple think the name through?  Or did they work with the developers of PingChat when developing this new tool?

[#3]

Yeah, PingChat is an app, and this is more of an integrated social-media environment. Don't know if the PingChat devs were in on it or not, but I think it unlikely, as control over the whole social media environment is tightly tied to iTunes, including content recommendations, playlists, etc.

[#4]

Yeah... that's why I was wondering.  Strange that Apple would have picked Ping as the name, especially given that PingChat is one of the more popular apps, especially now that it offers cross-platform instant messaging (covers iPhone, Android and BlackBerry).  Wonder if PingChat will have to change their name now.

Anyhow, it will be interesting to see how this new Ping integration works and if it catches on.

[#5]

Yeah, launching a new network and keeping it confusing -- par for the course. And there's already confusion over the OSX/Linux Ping command that's documented on the Apple Developer's site...some folk think it's API documentation

I'll have to give Ping a go later this week or so...could be interesting!