Apple's New Social Networking Service: Ping

오늘은 날씨가 무척이나 좋네요. 정말 구름 한 점 없는 하늘을 보며 이제 가을이 오는 것을 느끼고 있답니다. 이제 곧 태풍 말로가 한국을 덮칠 예정인데 별 피해없이 지나갔으면 좋겠습니다. 그러면 오늘의 포스팅을 시작할께요.

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   Apple introduced its new social networking service, Ping. Its new invention, as Apple clearly defined during the launching show, is a social networking service exclusively for music.

 Using this service, you can follow your favorite artists and friends to discover the music they are talking about, listening to, and downloading. One thing very striking about Ping is that you cannot connect your Ping account to Facebook or Twitter, a connection service that almost every social networking service currently provides. We can see how confident Apple is about the service.

 

   Apple is a leading company when it comes to music industry. iTunes is used by people all around the world. Considering that Apple's industry expansion into both TV and eBook industry, it is quite obvious that Ping will be integrated to those fields, contributing to the development of Apple Empire.

 

   Regarding online privacy, Ping provides its users some options to choose from. You can block other people from following you. Also, other users need your approval to become followers online. As you can see below, Ping deals with the online privacy issue, the very reason why Facebook is recently castigated by a bevy of online privacy regulators.

 

    Now that we have learned enough about Ping, let's see what you can actually do.

   You can see what your followers are up to by having a look at the recent activity section. Ping recommends artists or friends you might have interest in. Like Facebook, you can "like" other people's comments or suggestions. Something different about Ping is that you cannot update your status by writing short posts like you leave some messages on your Facebook wall. Only artists, as you can see in the above picture, can make posts at current stage. You, however, definitely can leave comments on the artists' posts.

   You now may wonder how you can converse with other people if Ping does not allow its users to upload posts. This is when iTunes comes in. When you search songs on iTuens, you can make some comments about the musics you like through iTunes and post them online.

   You can also enjoy this wonderful service via iPhones.

 

  Ping definitely is a unique service. There has been no social networking services that are specifically targeted at music. Real-time web services are undoubtedly being loved by a number of programmers and online users. Although we do not know until when this fad will continue, but it surely seems that Ping will garner some attention.