Josh OngThe Cupertino, Calif., company issued a press release to announce the good news. "One-third of the people who have downloaded iTunes 10 have joined Ping," said Eddy Cue, Apple's vice president of Internet Services. Cue expects the service to continue growing in coming weeks as more people download iTunes 10.
At Wednesday's keynote, Apple CEO Steve Jobs described Ping as "sort of like Facebook and Twitter meet iTunes." Users can follow artists and friends, and find out what others are purchasing and listening to.
With 160 million iTunes users in 23 countries, Ping has a ready audience, although users will have to opt-in to the service after downloading the latest version of iTunes.
Ping launched to mixed reactions. In response to Wednesday's product announcements, several analysts thought Ping "stole the show," while others questioned the viability of the social network.
The "social music discovery" service initially included a Facebook Connect option for finding friends, but the feature was quickly disabled. Jobs told journalist Kara Swisher Wednesday that the terms demanded by Facebook were "onerous."
Not all of the 1 million users are legitimate, though. Hours after launch, spammers had already begun posting links to "free iPhones" and scams. Numerous fake celebrity accounts have been created as well.
William Gallagher
Christine McKee
AppleInsider Staff
Chip Loder
Malcolm Owen
174 Comments
That's Nice... but I still prefer the ZUNE Marketplace's social networking implementation better at this point, if for no other reason than Apple's iTunes Store model is not well set up to support the kind of true music sharing/socializing system that the ZUNE Marketplace currently utilizes.
That's the beauty of having such a well-implemented subscription service as the ZUNE Pass, something that would severely impact Apple's current - 'you buy'... 'you don't like'... 'Too Bad, We've Already Got Our Money' - iTunes paradigm/scheme.
Apple is doomed!?
That's Nice... but I still prefer the ZUNE Marketplace's social networking implementation better at this point, if for no other reason than Apple's iTunes Store model is not well set up to support the kind of true music sharing/socializing system that the ZUNE Marketplace currently utilizes.
That's the beauty of having such a well-implemented subscription service as the ZUNE Pass, something that would severely impact Apple's current - 'you buy'... 'you don't like'... 'Too Bad, We've Already Got Our Money' - iTunes paradigm/scheme.
But ... 5 members?
I still prefer the ZUNE Marketplace's social networking implementation better .
Awesome!Now back to Apple. I wonder what Ping will look like in 6 months. Seems like an awful lot of users in a short period of time.
A lot of the spam seemed to go away about half an hour ago.
The new software just seemed so drab I just pulled the previous version of iTunes from one of my backup drives.