In a mildly surprising piece of news, Twitter announced that it has integrated its service with Apple’s burgeoning music social network, Ping. What does this mean for you?
Two things:
- Ping will automatically scan your Twitter contacts and find those that have Ping accounts too so you can add friends much more easily. It’s a helluva lot better than hunting down which of your friends have ping and manually inputting each of their email addresses.
- When you do something on Ping such as “like” a song or album, you’ll have the option to have Ping automatically tweet your activity and include a link to the piece of music’s iTunes page. If anyone views that tweet’s details on the new twitter website, they’ll get a widget that lets them preview a song without leaving the page.
The next time you log into Ping on iTunes, you’ll be prompted to link your accounts:
If you don’t have a Twitter account, you can feel free to ignore the prompt and conduct business as usual. After signing in to your Twitter account, you’ll have the option to import Twitter contacts who have Ping with a few short clicks. It’s painless and simple, unlike the 10 freeway during rush hour.
You can also disable the automatic tweeting if you are prone to activity binges on Ping (recommended by the lalawag ministry of social media etiquette) by unchecking this box in your Ping profile options:
So how do the Ping activity tweets look? Something like this:
The widget is actually pretty neat. You click on the little “play” button and the song preview starts playing without having to leave the page. Unfortunately last week’s announced 90 second song previews have not been implemented yet. Hopefully, the Twitter widget will incorporate these when they go live.
If you share an album, the widget will expand to offer previews of all the songs in the album. Clicking the link in the tweet should open up the iTunes client and take you to the piece of music in question. The only unfortunate thing about the tweet is that it’s going to make the #iTunes hashtag very cluttered. Good luck sifting through the Ping spam from actual iTunes talk.
With this seemingly simple integration, Apple and Twitter have made Ping eminently more usable. Now it just needs Facebook integration and full streaming songs and we’d be in business with an actually useful music discovery service.
