Apple recently held a media event to launch some new ipods, a new Apple TV and iTunes 10. Whilst the first two seem to have been largely welcomed, the new iTunes has created some debate. For starters, they’ve changed the UI so that now the minimise, maximise and close buttons are aligned vertically and the icons for music, movies, apps etc are devoid of colour. Whilst I like black & white photography, I quite like colour in my icons…

I’m a bit confused as to why they’ve decided to alter the window buttons when there is plenty of room to align them the normal way and Apple – please put the colour back in!

The second big thing is their new social network. I can’t help thinking this is just a starting point for bigger changes ahead, but at the moment it seems to aim itself squarely at Last.fm although comparisons with myspace have been made.

The difference between Ping (yes, that’s what they called it…) and Myspace is Ping offers little or no customisation options and whilst it does say you can connect to Facebook, I can’t for the life of me work out how.

Your profile has room for a photo, a brief “about me” section, an activity window where it tells people who you’ve started stalking and space for 8 handpicked thumbnails – you can thankfully leave out the embarrassing one-hit wonders in your collection. It doesn’t appear to show people what you are currently listening to though, so not quite like Last.fm either. You can follow anyone you like as long as they’ve set their profile to allow it, but you don’t appear to be able to message them…

I’m still trying to work out why they’ve bothered…I’m downloading the keynote video to see if that clears things up a bit. As they’ve bought a streaming company Lala, Spotify could be on Apple’s hit list in a future update…who knows.

_______________

After a bit more playing, things are starting to become clearer.  The lack of Facebook integration is apparently down to Apple & Facebook not reaching an agreement by the time Ping launched – talk of “onerous terms” demanded by Facebook…

Also, once you start adding people to follow, things start to make a bit more sense.  The itunes store has been updated with “like” buttons and “post” buttons allowing you to find an album you like and create a post about it.  This isn’t about telling people what you are having for breakfast or that you are enjoying a satisfying bowel movement – it’s not that sort of social network.  When you create a post from an album on the iTunes store it puts the album, the price and a “buy” button in your “recent activity” box.  A nice bit of community-driven “word of mouth” marketing there.

I do like how it has incorporated itself into the itunes store on the iOS devices.  Between “Videos” and “Search” you now have a Ping tab.  This then offers up three more tabs – Activity, People and My Profile.

More playing required!

Posted via email from Gavin Lewis’ posterous