Will Apple poach broadcast users?

With all the fury surrounding Apple’s latest announcements, we thought it would be fitting to recap the highlights and debate some of the opinions spewing out so far.

iTunes 10 & Ping: A social network for music

Some will call this a MySpace killer (available for upload now) but in this current configuration, I don’t think that is the case. After playing with the product and reading comments online, I think Apple’s insistence on a simple user experience in comparison to MySpace’s cluster of over personalization, went a little too far and features that should have been left in were left out. For example, there’s currently no easy way to follow people I actually know.

Apple claims on their site that there is a Facebook Connect feature allowing you to search for your Facebook friends easily. Well, this turns out not to be the case as Apple did not follow processes necessary to turn this feature on with Facebook. Namely, because Ping “pings” the Facebook API to such a significant degree, the social network requires Apple to pay for the service, something which was not negotiated ahead of time but I’m sure is in development now. Until this is resolved, I can only find my friends by entering in their email address one by one until I find someone. Yesterday, my friend from Berlin tracked me down so I officially have one real Ping friend. Continue reading “Will Apple poach broadcast users?”