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)

Ethan Kaplan on Apple’s Trojan Horse

A post from blackrimglasses in its entirety:

[Apple passes Amazon to become the #3 US music retailer]

Apple passes Amazon to become the #3 US music retailer - Engadget: this is the only real review of the iPhone (or AppleTV for that matter) that matters. The devices are secondary (although from what I understand and know, they are amazing). What is more important is the Apple trojan horse and the shifting of consumer behavior. Lest people forget, the Ipod was released a year (I think) before the music store. Apple just surpassed Amazon as a music retailer… hmmm…..

I agree. Apple’s hardware is the camel’s nose under the tent flap. In the cell phone market, apple’s gizmo will lead to astonishing shifting in the market dynamics.

Left-Handed Social Commerce

We are all used to the norms of real-world commerce: I want to buy something, say a fold-up bike, so I have to find out what bike stores have such goods in stock, and I drive all over town checking them out, and trying to get a deal.

The web (1.0) changed that dynamic. I can search for fold-up bikes online, compare prices, search for reviews, and then order the bike of my dreams online. Cool.

But I am doing all the work, and even if others help me along the way with advice or recommendations, they don’t get anything for it. And the information that I accumulate along the way usually just dissipates as soon as the transaction takes place: the myriad activities are never bundled together and published for others.

Web 2.0 tools exist to better this situation, but in general, they all fall short of my dreamscape, which I refer to as left-handed social commerce.

The solution I envision will be based on a social media/social networking platform, such as Facebook. I would be able to collate various observations and recommendations made by my contacts or me, as a sort of portfolio associated with the object of my desire: in this case, a fold-up bike. Once I have boiled down what it is I am after — either a specific make-and-model or a bunch of features, like number of gears, size, price range, and so on — I want to be able to post my buy. By posting my buy I mean offering the deal to the world of vendors out there.

In some way, I would like to have the platform anonymize my request for offers so that I can avoid being pestered, and I can filter out offers that don’t satisfy my concerns. For example, I only want offers from bike stores in the San Francisco area, because I want them to be able to fix the bike if it has problems. And I only want offers from highly rated sellers, and sellers that have been in business 3 years or more. Or sellers that at least some of my contacts have recommended. And so on.

But the real flip here is having the offers flow to me, as opposed to me wandering around in the web 1.0 world of pages, following links, like a rat in a maze. Sure, the rat is smart, and can solve the maze. But I don’t want to be a rat in a maze anymore. I want everything to flow to me.

And it’s not like I am consigning the vendors to running a maze: after all, the same platform could flow opportunities to them. A San Francisco bike shop carrying a variety of fold-up bikes could tag themselves appropriately within the hypothetical left-handed social commerce system, and my deal would flow to them. They could add a few parameters — prices, models, etc. — and flow it back to me.

We’d all get out of the maze.

Ebay is a big maze, where buyers have to do the work. Amazon. Whatever. Its all designed to make things easy for the retailer or the auction house. And we run the maze everytime we buy something online.

It’s interesting that I have had this discussion — more or less — with dozens of entrepreneurs in recent years, but I have yet to see a real solution emerge based on left-handed commerce and flow principles.

I also envision that I should get credit — reputation and commissions — based on the folio I develop on fold-up bikes. In a long-tail economy, a really good folio researching the alternatives could get hits for years. I could pass along some small discount to buyers who want the same thing I bought, as well as pocketing a small commission. Why not? When this sort of thing moves to the edge — for example in a social network platform like Facebook — and out of managed sites like Yelp, why shouldn’t we get the tips?

Amazon Gets IM: Maybe

So Werner Vogels, the CTO of Amazon, in a second post about IM and other infrastructure, now suggests that publishing the IM handles of Amazonians may not be so farfetched after all: definitely backpedalling from his April Fools stance that I criticized yesterday:

[from All Things Distributed: Amazon Gets IM - Part II by Werner Vogels]

In my eyes, instant messenger, weblogs, forums, tagging, wikis, etc, are infrastructure. Infrastructure in the sense that it is interesting in what you do with it, in how you use it to provide value. How it can be a vehicle to affect change. Amazon Connect looks to some people like weblogs-for-authors; to others it does not meet all the weblog definition criteria. Whether it does or not is completely irrelevant, what is important is that we wanted authors to have new ways in which they could interact with their readers, and in that way this program delivers the extra value our customers (authors and readers alike) look for at Amazon. The program is very successful and I am sure we will be improving it in ways to make it deliver even more value. I don’t think anybody cares whether new innovations around Amazon Connect will make it look more weblog-like, more IM like, or be something completely new.

For me, everything is game in making Amazon.com the best place for people to look for products, to provide their opinions about them, and to help other customers make good choices. If the best way to achieve that would include posting IM handles, or developing completely new real-time interaction techniques that match Amazon better, we would certainly do so. More importantly, we will continue to push the envelope in any area to deliver a better service.

Cool. I bet it is likely that Amazon will find itself looking more and more like the rest of the world, in which people are more and more connected. Why not blogs for authors? Why not an IM handle for Werner? Sure, publishing IM handles requires increasingly sophisticated filtering — so that you can be ‘busy’ to most everyone but ‘available’ to your inner circle when time-stressed — but the idea is still of general merit, so I am glad that Werner has recast the discussion in such a way that IM is not portrayed as something beyond the pale for the serious enterprise in an April Fools post.

If Amazon wants to hang onto the formidable brand advantage they have created, they had better be willing to explore the newest and most connecting technologies out there, or else, as usual these days, the edge will come and dissolve the center, and take their market lead with it.

Amazon Gets IM - Part II

I guess it’s an April Fools Day joke, but why is it funny?

[from All Things Distributed: Amazon Gets IM by Werner Vogels]

In order to get closer to their customers, humanize Amazon, increase sales, and stay modern, Amazon.com has decided to make all Instant Messenger (IM) handles of its employees public. This way Amazon.com customers will get unprecedented access to the talented engineers at Amazon to answer all their questions, or just to have an interesting conversation about a new book or that old sci-fi movie. If you want to know why the shipping prediction date was not really clear, feel free to IM Justin Rudd, and get the details behind the algorithms he used to give Amazon.com customers a fast estimate on when they can expect their purchases.

As we have come to expect by now, Amazon.com is once again revolutionizing the industry with how customers are being served. It is expected other companies will be scrambling to imitate their success, and provide access to their employees also. Industry specialists and sociology professors alike have lauded Amazon.com for really “getting it”, for understanding that IM is the way that future generations will want to communicate.

Yeah, and? I guess the conventional wisdom is that we don’t want to publish our IM handles.

But didn’t eBay buy Skype so they could thread all the ecommerce going on there with real-time communication? Wake up, Werner. It’s not funny.