Twitter has teamed up with Apple to get music previews (from Ping) directly into tweet streams everywhere. Any country that has iTunes support will start to see Ping recommendations popping up in the timeline. The partnership is mutually beneficial. Twitter users will be able to both see Ping “likes” from iTunes, as well as add each other via their Twitter account on the Ping network.
But, it’s not all roses.
I love sharing my music as much as the next guy, but I absolutely detest auto-tweets, so much in fact, that I even manually share — by hand — Macgasm articles on Twitter. The auto-tweets from Ping are almost as lame as they get. Here’s a sample tweet from Ping: “likes Bear by The Antlers on Ping http://c.itunes.apple.com/us/event/id157575133T4T2?i=322115095 #iTunes.” Ping doesn’t even auto-shorten the iTunes URLs — what’s that all about?
Being able to jump directly into iTunes from Twitter is pretty handy, especially if you follow a lot of people with similar music tastes, or if you keep your Twitter followers to people you actually share musical interests with, but that usually isn’t the case for most.
No offence to those I follow on Ping, but I’m not going to be taking many music recommendations from some of you, as we’re just in different places musically.
The one saving grace, and it’s probably the reason why Apple teamed up with Twitter, is that you can find friends on Ping based on your Twitter account. Ping seriously needed that kind of functionality, and Twitter has provided it, but in my opinion, Facebook would have been better. While I usually prefer Twitter over Facebook, in this case, I’m more likely to have interest in music recommendations from people on Facebook that I grew up with than people I’ve met on Twitter.
So what do you think? Will Twitter integration save Ping, or is it already dead? I don’t know one person in my circle of friends that even uses the “social network.”
Article Via The Twitter Blog
