Ping—The Walled Music Social Network

The biggest news in iTunes 10 is the Ping music-focused social network. Ping lets you follow (in the Twitter sense) performers and other iTunes users, meaning you'll see which songs they "liked, purchased, or commented on." It also lets users indicate concerts they plan to attend, and offers to find you tickets, too. Really, it's just a direct link to TicketMaster's page for the event. The activity stream looks a lot like Facebook's, down to the blue theme.

You're very limited to what you can post to Ping, as compared with Facebook—no photos, links, or videos, and the lack of a Web version means that Ping lives strictly within iTunes' walled garden. Sure, Apple claims over 160 million iTunes users as potential Pingers, but do users want to open a particular app to take part in a vertical social network, when vertical social networks have pretty much fallen by the wayside anyway? Gmail has more users than iTunes, but Google Buzz is still having trouble getting off the ground.

Privacy is well handled in Ping. You can choose to manually designate which actions to share with your followers, require your approval before anyone can follow you, or not allow others to follow you, if you just want to see what other musicians and fans are up to. If someone you want to follow has protected their posts, you'll get a request-to-follow message box.

A few other drawbacks are that you must use your full name on your Ping page, you can't see "friends"' libraries (let alone stream them), and there's no way to find Ping friends from Facebook or Twitter. In the end, Ping seems more of a marketing tool than a social network, with nearly every post including a buy link. Web-based alternatives like Last.fm (Free, ) actually let you listen to your contact's music in full, rather than just the first 30 seconds iTunes' preview restrict you to. That way you can just buy your MP3 from Amazon.com or whatever other online store you like and still have it noted in your social music net. Ping is a decent service—but whether or not it succeeds will depend on the extent to which iTunes' vast pool of users adopts it. For more on Apple's new social network, read my Apple iTunes Ping: Hands On.

Anyway,itunes improves its new feather.We still always get some problems,such as play the favourite dvds on your itunes.If getting similar questions,you have to depend on some stuff such as dvd to itunes software, etc. Pretty shame.