iTunes Ping: Social Music

Apple has rolled out the long-rumored and much awaited social iTunes in the form of Ping.

Ping is a streaming, social network-based suite of capabilities that has been integrated across the world of iTunes, in a way that is reminiscent of early versions of Last.fm, and using the now standard open follower model popularized by Twitter.

To use the service, an iTunes 10 user has to click on the new Ping label in the left sidebar of iTunes, in the STORE area. Then there is some setup, basically geared toward what should be presented to followers and privacy controls on followers:

Once this is set up the user has a minimal profile with location, bio, name provided by the user and some musical genre categorization offered by by iTunes, along with streams of actions taken by the user, like buying music, liking albums, and purchasing tickets for concerts:

(I did include an avatar, but Apple is still ‘processing’ it. I wonder if humans are eyeballing it for nudity or something.)

I followed a few celebrities, like Dave Matthews, and I sent out a call on Twitter, and got a few followers and following set up, for experimental purposes. Now when I look at ‘recent activity’ there are actually posts and activities from inbound stream (=those I follow).

(mostly everybody is following, and not doing much else yet.)

The integration of concert information associated with artists is very cool, and suggests how Apple expects social commerce to be a main source of revenue:

The instrumentation for Ping is spread throughout the store, so anytime you are looking at music for sale you will be able to ‘like’ it, rate it, buy it (d’uh) or write a post (stream based) or review (album based).

In the future, all online commerce will be socialized.

I find the fact that reviews and posts aren’t the same thing sort of strange. But we’ll have to see what gives after some more rooting around.

Lastly, everything I am saying about music could be extended to the other sorts of media that iTunes markets: TV shows, movies, books, whatever. But it hasn’t been at this point.

I have only fooled with Ping for an hour or so, so my empirical analysis will have to be delayed for a few days, at least. However, the largest glaring gap to me right now is the fact that my own music — the stuff I have on my hard drive — isn’t part of the Ping experience. If I want to ‘like’ or post about something I am playing on my local iTunes instance I would have to open the store, find the song or album there, and then make my gesture. This is just a pain, but could conceivably be remedied when Apple allows me to upload my music to that enormous cloud server park they are building. Then all my music will be indexed, cross tabulated, and sharable.

Recall that a few weeks ago a new release of iDisk that included the tantalizing capability to stream audio from the cloud to my iPhone or MacBook (see Apple Takes A Baby Step Toward iTunes In The Cloud). There is no doubt in my mind that we are headed in that direction.

Imagine a future release of Ping where I could share playable playlists, or live stream a Stowe Boyd radio station, or I could listen to a new track recommended by a friend and comment on that streaming recommendation. Or imagine streaming movies in sync with my son Keenan, with Facetime heckling superimposed so it is like a living room experience, although he is in his bedroom at college.

Apple is on the threshold of something fundamentally transformative. It turns out that some commentators agree:

Om Malik, Why Ping Is the Future of Social Commerce

Ping may function like a cross between Facebook and Twitter for iTunes by allowing you to follow celebrities, create social cliques and get artist updates via an activity stream. I think it could have tremendous impact on social sharing and commerce.

From a content perspective, there are three different types of media we love to talk about: movies we see, music we listen to and books we are reading. These are accepted social norms. In fact, many relationships are made on the basis of collective love of a movie and many friendships have started with mixed tapes.

It makes perfect sense for a music service to be social. I’m not alone: The popularity YouTube, the fast-growing MOG and the sadly defunct iLike and Imeem show that people gravitate towards music as a common, collective experience. A recommendation from friends on Last.fm often resulted in me buying many-a-few music tracks. My friends who listened to Thievery Corporation turned me on to The Broadway Project and Chris Joss, which I ended up buying on the iTunes store or via Amazon’s MP3 store.

This click-and-go-somewhere-to-download model of affiliate links can never match a unified experience. Amazon, for example, encourages bloggers and others to link to things they like and then get a piece of the action. This separates social from commerce and treats them as two discrete activities. On the post-Facebook Internet, I don’t think anyone can afford to keep these two actions distinct.

I agree with Om, and obviously Amazon will have to rethink its ‘enormous catalog’ model for commerce, and scramble to make it all social. And Apple and its competitors will have to provide hooks so that I can take my Ping stream and embed it in my blog, direct it to Twitter, and so forth.

I have been saying for years that ‘in the future, all online commerce will be socialized’, and Apple is showing how this is going to be realized.

Apple apparently considered integration with Facebook, but couldn’t come to terms, according to Kara Swisher. Strategically, Facebook is likely to become a direct competitor with Apple, so Jobs is playing go with Zuckerberg, and has won this game.

Amazon might make the devil’s bargain with Facebook to counter Jobs, but that’s a matchup that might just not do much. We’ll have to see if Bezos is impatient.

But there are many doubters out there too:

Sam Diaz, Ping: Apple should leave social to Facebook, Twitter

Ping is an interesting idea and music is something that we have been sharing with friends for the longest time. It strikes me as interesting that Apple has come up with a way to allow people to “share” their music tastes but not the music itself - which I never would have expected Apple or the record labels to do. Is this one way to make “sharing” music OK?

Apple is good at what it does - hardware, software, design and, of course, marketing. But social networking? Even if it is tied to music, I just can’t see widespread adoption of Ping - even if it’s forced on us through iTunes.

Man, Diaz will regret this a year or so from now. Maybe he missed the experiment with streaming via iDisk? Did he miss the launch of the new Apple TV? Can’t he imagine a Flipboard channel based on what’s happening in your iTunes network, with embedded videos, photos, music samples?

Another oddball take on Ping:

Chris Matyszczyk, How Apple’s Ping dings Twitter, Facebook

Ping picks at the nice parts of Facebook and Twitter—friending and following—and offers these benefits to its users without the generalists’ pains.

Unlike Twitter, for example, these are all real people. Unlike Facebook, you can just wander around and see who or what you like without having to become someone’s friend and without having to like anything at all.

This is real people with a real enthusiasm meeting in a bar and talking about a subject they love, rather than about a subject they often hate—themselves. There’s very nice music playing in the background, too.

How many truly passionate, fundamental enthusiasms do large numbers of people share? Movies and sports, probably. Books and food, perhaps. (I wonder if there really are all that many.) Right now, these are often all being talked about on Facebook, each fighting with another for sufficient attention across very mixed groups.

It might not happen that hundreds of niche social networks will suddenly become enormously successful as people decide to fragment themselves across their various enthusiasms. But there are a few core subjects that arouse passion, conversation and the spending of money. Music is one. Apple is another.

Why do the passions have to be shared by large groups of people? Isn’t it sufficient that there are many small groups of people sharing passions? Oh, and don’t leave out TV, which is an enormous passion, as are sports. And yes, people will tolerate — or even seek out — fracturing their social being across multiple services: the post-modern identity is a network of identities, a multiphrenic sense of self.

Are these tech mavens completely missing where this is headed?

related articles

• Ping: First Look at the iTunes Social Network (readwriteweb.com)
• Why Ping Is the Future of Social Commerce (gigaom.com)
• iTunes 10 Is All About Ping, Apple’s Social Network for Music [Ping] (gizmodo.com)
• 10+ random thoughts on Ping and iTunes (ouriel.typepad.com)
• Will iTunes’ Ping Be a Success? (mindjumpers.com)
• Ping Is the Last Nail in the Coffin for MySpace (mashable.com)

2 September 2010 21 Permalink

Last.fm Partners With Sony: Should Have Been Apple

Recent announcement of Last.fm partnering with Sony:

[from Last.fm Partners With Sony: WebProNews]

Online social music network, Last.fm has partnered with Sony BMG Music Entertainment.

As part of the partnership Sony BMG will offer its catalogue of recordings to the 20 million users of Last.fm’s radio streaming service. Users will be able to find new artists from the Sony catalogue using Last.fm’s recommendation system.

I had suggested in past posts, prior to CBS’ purchase of Last.fm, that Apple should acquire the product and build into a socialized version of iTunes (which is still desperately needed, btw).

Looks like Last.fm is destined for a strange collection of deals, rather than a strategic role in a contender to the iTunes/iPod/iPhone triumvirate. Although I am not sure who can mount a credible attack on that. Even Microsoft hasn’t got a chance. Nokia?

Well, its moot, since Last.fm is part of CBS. It has to make it or break it based on its own merits, and maybe some better economics for users acquiring music, not on some integration with other major software partners.

9 July 2007 Permalink

CBS Buys Last.fm

I am slightly out of touch here in Copenhagen — my hotel does not have Internet in the rooms — so I learned that CBS has acquired Last.fm via Twitter today (thanks, Paulo).

[from from Reuters]

Media group CBS Corp said on Wednesday it had paid $280 million in cash for the popular music social network service Last.fm.

CBS said in a statement the online service had more than 15 million active users in more than 200 countries. The Last.fm team will continue to run the online network under the terms of the deal.

I met with Felix Miller and Stefan Glänzer of Last.fm in London a month ago, and I suggested that Apple should but Last.fm as the basis of a social iTunes. They looked at each other. I asked if something was in the works, and they politely wiggled away from that line of inquiry. It’s clear now, of course, that they were in talks with CBS… and maybe others.

[Also reported by the BBC and Los Angeles Times]

30 May 2007 Permalink

Blogs Multiply. Our Heads Explode

Dave Sifry has posted new news about the Blogosphere: It continues to grow, and the rate of growth continues to increase:

[from Sifry’s Alerts: State of the Blogosphere, April 2006 Part 1: On Blogosphere Growth]

• Technorati now tracks over 35.3 Million blogs
• The blogosphere is doubling in size every 6 months
• It is now over 60 times bigger than it was 3 years ago
• On average, a new weblog is created every second of every day
• 19.4 million bloggers (55%) are still posting 3 months after their blogs are created
• Technorati tracks about 1.2 Million new blog posts each day, about 50,000 per hour

Where is the end of this growth? Surely we cannot get to the point where everyone on Earth has a blog or two going, can we? Can we?

Perhaps we can.

Maybe more and more young people will adopt the MySpace/LiveJournal/Mobblogging ethos, and use blogs as a means of self-expression: every one of them. Perhaps every student in every English class will create a blog for their homework, and why not Chemistry, too? Maybe every aspiring chef will post recipes with pictures, and every restaurant will update their daily specials online. Every company will have one for every product in every product line. Every civic group, every non-profit, every band, every town government, every art gallery, every massage parlor. Why not?

So where is the end? And how will we make sense of the immense flood of writing, insight, photos, video, and cross-connections?

Obviously, Technorati is trying gamely to keep up with the flood, but I already see the need for specialization intruding. Memetrackers like tech.memorandum and Tailrank are one alternative to the search/link analysis models that Google and Technorati employ. Human agency — like digg, Squidoo, Top Ten Sources, and Corante Hubs — offer an alternate path, based on human filtering.

But I would rather see and use a social tool, one that makes sense of who I am, what I like, and who I know.

Why isn’t there a solution that is equivalent to Last.fm for blogs, for example? It would require a small plug-in, that would track what I read, anywhere, and would build up a list of my favorite ‘artists’ (bloggers, not musicians) just like the Audioscrobbler plugin does based on iTunes play. I would then — after an appropriate time — be provided with a collection of blog reading neighbors whose preferences are somewhat like mine, and then I could roam around in this virtual neighborhood, looking at what they have been reading, and their commentary on it. People could rate their favorite posts, tag anything, and create a stream of their favorite stuff for others to tap into, like a Last.fm radio station. These virtual neighbors could become my friends, in fact, since we could contact each other, link to each other’s comments, and so on.

That’s the solution to the immensity of the Web. Just like the wide, wide world, we can accomodate the Web only a neighborhood at a time. So we need tools that carve neighborhoods out of the web where they don’t really exist, yet, or if they do, they are so virtual as to be invisible. We need tools to bring these neighborhoods into the light, and make it easy to make sense of the exploding blogosphere by bringing it back down into human scale.

I am sure that I will get all sorts of email from various vendors saying, “Stowe, check out our site… That’s what we do.” Well, so far I haven’t seen it. Maybe the guys at Last.fm should repurpose their current technology to support this. Felix?

18 April 2006 Permalink

30 Boxes beta on February 5th

I am joining in the chorus of praise for 30 Boxes (along with Scoble, Thomas Hawk (who calls it the best calendar ever), Matt Mullenweg, and Om, who called 30 boxes the gmail of calendars) even though I have only fooled with it for a few hours. I posted about it a few days ago, but just based on others’ thoughts. But now I have gotten access to the beta (thanks Narendra!)

In the past few months I have fiddled with a long list of online calendar tools — Plaxo, Planzo, Kiko, Airset, and Trumba — but I haven’t connected with any of them. Mostly because I am looking for a calendar tool to pull together the various unconnected elements of a digital life, not to simply replace a Filofax.

30 Boxes is at an incomplete stage, but what there is is dead-on. Especially the social element.

In this screenshot (click to expand), I have clicked on a particular day, and all the timestamped elements of my digital world are pulled in: blog posts, Flickr photos, and I had hoped to see recent music played from Last.fm, but I had some sort of RSS snafu. (Along the way I discovered that my favorite geoloco app, Plazes.com, does not provide an RSS feed for my peregrinations, which is dumb.)

But also notice the stuff that my new buddy, Thomas Hawk, has incorporated into his calendar which I am including into mine. This is where it gets interesting.

30Boxes allows users to tag events, which would perhaps be cool all on its own. However, when you are setting up the sharing filters for friends getting access to you calendar, you can restrict access to those events tagged with specific terms. For the members of a project team, you can grant access only to events with the project name tag, for example. Or you can show your karate events to other karateka from your dojo. Or family events to family.

There’s a long shopping list of missing things — scheduling meetings, iCal subscribe and publish, RSS feeds, inward filters (I might want to only see certain things from Thomas’ calendar, even if he is giving me everything), javascript (for embedding calendars into blogs and other websites), search, and groups (all members of a team could be managed at once) — but what is there is good.

And of course, I still want the Nerdvana buddylist view: where the various posts, pictures, and events associated with my friends are displayed as attributes hanging off an instant messaging style buddylist, and my attributes and presence info are displayed to them in their buddylists. But I bet I will have to wait for Yahoo, Google, MSN, or AOL to provide that for me.

4 February 2006 1 Permalink