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Apple announces iTunes 10 with Ping Social Network

engadget.com

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Re: Apple announces iTunes 10 with Ping Social Network

#81

Post by noahth »

wmeredith wrote: post #71
keltex wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple really is amazing. We keep thinking they are going to go after the usual suspects like Google, Microsoft, and RIM. Now they are aiming their guns at Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg must not be happy.

Indeed. I could see this getting used for a lot more than just music. Especially since it's so tightly integrated with something I already use a lot. And there's no privacy issue.

i think you mean there's no privacy issue yet. facebook didn't have nearly the level of privacy hand-wringing that it does now when it was only open to students at select college campuses. but along came employers, and parents, and all sorts of other groups, and suddenly this "safe place" was full of people whose intentions did not match your initial expectations. same will easily happen to any network that reaches a certain size, ubiquity, etc.

Re: Apple announces iTunes 10 with Ping Social Network

#83

Post by crowsfan85 »

thought_alarm wrote: post #11
gyardley wrote: post #5

Can I please have an application that just does the one simple thing it's supposed to? I feel like soon both iTunes and GMail are going to try to order my groceries for me.

You can always use QuickTime Player (or an antique version of WinAmp) if that's all you want.

Yes, Winamp 2.95 still is outstanding. Simple, functional, tiny footprint, etc.

Get it here: http://www.oldversion.com/Winamp.html and apply AlpineAmp skin: http://customize.org/winamp2/skins/4571

The lesson- Sometimes newer and more "features" != better.

Re: Apple announces iTunes 10 with Ping Social Network

#84

Post by andfarm »

danilocampos wrote: post #33
Perceval wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's pretty amazing the number of things that have been smuggled into the old SoundJam: Quicktime, Webkit (occasionally Safari), the music store (expanded to video and games and apps too), Genius recommendations, and now a social network.

Ahh, good ol' SoundJam. Those were the days. I really didn't like iTunes at first -- I stuck with SoundJam for a good long time. Until I moved to OS X, actually.

The funniest part is that the "finished importing" chime hasn't changed since SoundJam 1.0.

Re: Apple announces iTunes 10 with Ping Social Network

#85

Post by benologist »

zppx wrote: post #55
benologist wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of people already have iTunes ... not to mention with 230,000 new iOS activations a day they're coming pre-armed with massive traction. They could take it in a whole lot of different directions but nothing about iTunes is aimed at filling some tiny little niche. Why would they bother aiming so low now?

Sure there are ways to Apple amass a large user base with Ping, but I think it is hard to fight with the extensible, and relatively open, Facebook that can be accessed from any browser, I see no point for someone that does not use iTunes Store, an iOS device or iTunes installing iTunes only to use Ping. I think that initially Apple does want to use it to profit more with areas that they already are strong and also ga…

Of course it'd be a hard fight. But that it'd be a fight at all makes them 1000x more dangerous than anything else in the last few years.

Re: Apple announces iTunes 10 with Ping Social Network

#86

Post by Someone »

WiseWeasel wrote: post #50
danilocampos wrote: post #8

I'm skeptical about Apple doing a social media platform, yet iTunes is a perfect trojan horse. It might not even have to be good to succeed.

Do people associate using iTunes with social networking, however? Are you going to fire up iTunes to socialize with your friends on your Ping wall? Are you even going to invite your friends to your Ping contacts? Or are you simply going to keep using Facebook to post about that new album you just got that you really like?

I got the impression that the intended preferred way to interact with Ping will be from one's iPad/iPhone/iPod, not from desktop iTunes.

Re: Apple announces iTunes 10 with Ping Social Network

#87

Post by Someone »

WiseWeasel wrote: post #50
danilocampos wrote: post #8

I'm skeptical about Apple doing a social media platform, yet iTunes is a perfect trojan horse. It might not even have to be good to succeed.

Do people associate using iTunes with social networking, however? Are you going to fire up iTunes to socialize with your friends on your Ping wall? Are you even going to invite your friends to your Ping contacts? Or are you simply going to keep using Facebook to post about that new album you just got that you really like?

I got the impression that the intended preferred way to interact with Ping will be from one's iPad/iPhone/iPod, not from desktop iTunes.

Re: Apple announces iTunes 10 with Ping Social Network

#88

Post by telemachos »

gyardley wrote: post #5

Can I please have an application that just does the one simple thing it's supposed to? I feel like soon both iTunes and GMail are going to try to order my groceries for me.

In the case of Google, this is pretty much exactly where they are headed (by design):

"I actually think most people don't want Google to answer their questions," he elaborates. "They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next."

Let's say you're walking down the street. Because of the info Google has collected about you, "we know roughly who you are, roughly what you care about, roughly who your friends are." Google also knows, to within a foot, where you are. Mr. Schmidt leaves it to a listener to imagine the possibilities: If you need milk and there's a place nearby to get milk, Google will remind you to get milk. It will tell you a store ahead has a collection of horse-racing posters, that a 19th-century murder you've been reading about took place on the next block.

Says Mr. Schmidt, a generation of powerful handheld devices is just around the corner that will be adept at surprising you with information that you didn't know you wanted to know. "The thing that makes newspapers so fundamentally fascinating—that serendipity—can be calculated now. We can actually produce it electronically," Mr. Schmidt says.

Source: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870490110457542...

Re: Apple announces iTunes 10 with Ping Social Network

#89

Post by jbrennan »

tvon wrote: post #75
leviathant wrote: post #38

Given how poorly iTunes 9 runs on my quad-core Win7 machine with gigs and gigs of ram, I'm not particularly excited by this news. Wake me up when they've completely rebuilt iTunes. The only reason I keep it around is for my iPhone - I've switched to Zune (of all things) as my music manager, and actually quite like most of how it organizes things. On a less grumpy note, the $99 Apple TV they just launched is pretty sm…

It's kind of amusing how bad iTunes is on Windows, all while Apple talks about how writing for a meta-platform produces lower quality software. It doesn't even look good, IMO, at least not compared to running natively on OSX.

I think it proves their point pretty well. Cross-platform-kits equal sub-par experiences almost every time.

Re: Apple announces iTunes 10 with Ping Social Network

#90

Post by jsz0 »

gyardley wrote: post #5

Can I please have an application that just does the one simple thing it's supposed to? I feel like soon both iTunes and GMail are going to try to order my groceries for me.

What one simple thing is iTunes supposed to do? From early on it's been a multi-function program. It would be very difficult to pick out a small subset of features to point at as the core functionality of iTunes since from the early days it's been a music player, CD ripper, store, device manager, etc. Probably the last major new category of functionality added before Ping (which arguably is just an extension of the store) was video playback.
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