iTunes Ping
I just recently started using iTunes Ping, and my first impression was ‘Facebook/Twitter for Music’; pretty neat. If you have friends on Ping, then you can follow them, and see what they are listening to and/or interested in. Finding your ‘actual’ friends is pretty easy, since you know there name and often times e-mail, but finding the ‘real’ artists is another matter. Apple apparently didn’t learn or pay attention to the problem Twitter had a few years ago when it started: fake accounts. Another neat feature of Ping, is for actual artists to promote other artists. If you like Trent Reznor or Paul van Dyk, you might want to follow them and see what they are listening to. But in the event you pick the wrong account, or perhaps the artist doesn’t even have an ‘official’ Ping account, then all you end up doing is following some asshat douchebag who thought he would create an account using the name of an actual artist.
I think the ‘verified’ or ‘official’ account identifier that Twitter put in place should be Enhancement #1 on the Ping backlog. I’m still liking the service, and will continue to use it, but I’ll stay away from following artists until this gets resolved.
