September 1, 2010: Apple’s new music-focused social network, Ping, ships as part of iTunes 10. Apple says the service will let users discover new music and more easily follow their favorite artists.
Ping racks up 1 million signups in the first 48 hours. Nevertheless, Apple’s social network is doomed from the start.
If you’re sick of YouTube’s ever-shifting terms, or you don’t like how lame Instagram has become, and you just want somewhere to post your videos without interference, then why not post them on your own microblog? Thanks to an update to Micro.blog, you can now do just that, as easily as posting a photo.
Riffr is yet another social network, this one based around audio snippets. And maybe it’ll actually take off, despite its awful design. It’s as if the makers took the confusion that is late-stage Instagram as a starting point, and then made things worse from there.
That said, Riffr could be quite useful.
Twitter is like that part of town where City Hall just lets anyone open up a bar or a restaurant. It’s lively, and it’s where everyone hangs out, but you certainly don’t want to take the wrong side street late at night. Maybe you’re ready to leave Twitter, thanks to its continued censorship of unknown individuals and simultaneous encouragement of hate speech and lies by more famous people and organizations.
If you’re serious about ditching Twitter, then you probably want to delete your tweets. Twitter feeds off “engagement.” If you delete your tweets, you leave nothing to engage with (although their “content” has probably been mined clean already). If you delete your tweets, and change your Twitter bio to say you’ve quit, this sends a stronger message than just slipping out the side door. It also helps stop someone else from pretending to be you.
Facebook is upping its game with video. Soon, Facebook will be able to automatically identify friends in videos and tag them. Better yet, it’ll store this information so when you want to find that moment again, you could find the video by searching for your friend’s name and then jump straight to when they appear in frame.
Path — the mobile only social network that I don’t understand, no one at Cult of Mac uses, and which recently started selling stickers to support itself — has laid off 13 staff members, or 20% of its total staff, in what CEO Dave Morin is calling a “realignment of the company.”
Developer Inq Mobile has just announced a new version of a content discovery app, Material, now available for iOS users as well as those on Android. It’s a free app that aims to sort through millions of sites to find stuff you’ve already showed an interest in, via Twitter and Facebook.
Material grabs all of the sites you’ve linked to, shared, and re-tweeted to deliver a personalized, magazine-style collection of the online ephemera that you’re already checking out, but all in one place.
The app has been on Android for a while now, and has just come to iOS with a newly re-designed app for the iPhone, dropping updates twice a day to your chosen device.
The more and more we all use social network tools like Facebook and Twitter, the more we can see the benefit of using them in smaller, more unique groups. How great would it be to have a social network that is only open to members of a school project, a church group, or a hot rod club? Instead of going through the hassle of building a Facebook group, figuring out privacy and membership, you could just connect folks together easily and quickly and be done with it.
Well, the folks at Celly seem to have thought of that already, offering a build your own social network that you can create and manage while you’re on the go.
Twitter has released a new iPhone app in the App Store, and it’s called Vine. According to Twitter, “Vine is the best way to see and share life in motion. Create short, beautiful, looping videos in a simple and fun way for your friends and family to see.”
6-second clips can be uploaded to Twitter from the app, and you can play them back right in embedded tweets on the web and in Twitter’s official mobile apps.
iOS contact aggregation app, Brewster, updated today and added a feature that might make you wonder why it wasn’t there in the first place: the contacts on your iPhone itself. While Brewster already pulled contact info from your Facebook friends, Twitter followers, LinkedIn profile, Gmail account, and Foursquare contacts, this is the first time its connected directly to the native iPhone contacts you carry around with you every day.
