From AOL:
Poor Apple. The company has lined up all the pieces to take over the media industry, but the big music labels and movie studios keep standing in its way. So Apple has been forced to build its media empire in a stealthy, piecemeal fashion…
First, iTunes is going social. Sure, the timing is odd given the Facebook privacy backlash and Twitter fatigue. But building a social network around music is a great idea — so good, in fact, that it was the idea that first made MySpace an out-of-nowhere success back in 2003. MySpace, of course, had much grander plans and wanted to be all things to all users. The result was an ungainly mess, and users fled to Facebook.
But a quick look at Ping, the social network built into iTunes, suggests Apple understands two important truths about the social web. First, social media isn’t an end in itself — it’s a feature. Second, as a feature, it needs to offer a service the people actually want to use. MySpace abandoned both those truths, and that explains a lot about why users abandoned MySpace…
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