In a single week, Facebook has become not just a competitor to Apple, but the Mother of All Apple Competitors.
Facebook this week announced a series of initiatives and partnerships that the New York Times says makes Facebook a “primary entertainment hub.”
Facebook’s 800 million users will be able to play and share music from Spotify, MOG, Rdio, Rhapsody, Turntable.fm, VEVO, Slacker, Songza, TuneIn, iheartradio, Deezer, Earbits, Jelli, mixcloud and other services, right from their profiles and News Feeds.
Facebook will enable the discovery, sharing, buying and renting of movies and TV shows via Netflix, Hulu, Blockbuster, IMDB, Dailymotion and Flixter.
And just as the iPad is gaining traction as the electronic newspaper of choice, Facebook announces partnerships with the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Slate, the Associated Press, Reuters, Yahoo News and others to make Facebook the default online newspaper site.
Facebook is now more directly threatening to Apple’s business model than Microsoft, Google and Sony combined.
Wondering what to expect from iCloud? Here's what we think you'll see based upon iCloud's predecessor, Lala.
While much has been made over Apple’s uncharacteristic pre-conference spilling of the beans regarding the impending announcement of a new, web-based service called iCloud, no one really knows what this “amazing,” “fantastic” and “magical” new service is going to look, feel or sound like — and won’t — until Steve Jobs unveils it to the audience at San Francisco’s Moscone West auditorium next week.
Still, we can put together a reasonable idea of the service iCloud will provide based upon Lala, the streaming music service Apple bought back in 2009. Assuming that Apple is basing iCloud on Lala and filling in the blanks with the latest industry reports and rumors, here’s a complete overview of what we think iCloud will look like when it’s announced on Monday.
When Apple first unveiled Ping, its new music-based social network half-baked into the latest version of iTunes, Facebook integration wasn’t just promised… it was listed as a feature on Apple’s own promotional pages.
Nonetheless, much to users’ mystification, Ping launched with Facebook support M.I.A., a deal having fallen through at the last minute after fifteen months of talks due to what CEO Steve Jobs described as “onerous terms” on the part of the social network giant.
According to Silicon Valley Insider, though, Facebook CTO Bret Taylor is now saying that he is “very confident” that Facebook and Apple will figure out a way to work together on Ping.
If you’ve updated iTunes to 10.0.1 in the last day or so, you might have noticed that Ping is pushing itself in your face rather more forcefully than before.
One thing: there’s the Ping sidebar on the right. Another: there’s a new Ping drop-down menu that appears in your music library, alongside any song you have selected.
They’re fine if you use Ping, but if you don’t, you might want to get rid of them. The sidebar is easy to deal with, you can hide it with a click. But the drop-down menu requires a little more tinkering to get rid of.
![This Is What To Expect From Apple’s New iCloud Music Service [Feature]](http://cdn.cultofmac.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/apple_icloud.jpg "apple_icloud.jpg")
