Apple to publish new music-centric social app?
Most Apple rumors concern hardware. Now, however, there is a rumor that Apple is working to create a social networking application centered around music sharing and having the ability to connect multiple Web sites.
Originally, this rumor had the social networking aspect being introduced as a part of iTunes, perhaps even in the most recent update. That, of course, did not pan out. Now the rumor has been shifted to include the creation of a new standalone application. Although the rumor is beginning to reverberate from several sources, it was originally reported in The Boy Genius Report and has been frequently updated there.
The most recent news from that site says, “The social networking integration that we reported iTunes 9 would have seems to be part of a bigger social networking push by Apple. We’ve been informed that Apple has plans to tie iTunes 9 into a “Social” application that they plan to release in the future. It was said that the application (separate from iTunes) will be similar to Yahoo’s OneConnect offering and consolidate all your social networking services. (iPhone application? Desktop app? Wasn’t clarified to us).”
The gist of the new application would seem to be the sharing of music listening habits among friends, which would seem to be a natural for Apple, the owners of the most popular on-line music store. The rumor also states that they would be able to do that sharing across a number of social networking sites, perhaps such as Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter. Similar to many recent social networking aggregators, all of the involved networks could be updated with a single user post.
More recently, this rumor has been tied in with other reports that Blu-ray was coming to the Mac platform, and some pundits have expanded it to include both music and video-based sharing functions. The original Blu-ray rumors had that video format being added to new iMac model releases. Although it was not clear from any of the reports, it was implied that the music sharing application could be both a Mac application and an iPhone app.
Even if these specific rumors are not true, it is easy to see that there is a continuing hunger for apps based around audio and video media. Much of the subject matter in social networking consists of music, television, and film conversations. Even if Apple is not currently considering an app such as that being reported, the potential popularity of such an app cannot be questioned, so perhaps they should be considering it.
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August 15th, 2009
If you like the idea of sharing your favorite songs via Facebook, Twitter, and Email from your iPhone or iPod Touch, check out the Mobile Music Messenger (MMM) app that just went live in the iTunes app store http://bit.ly/mefQp