Gose Stories

News items and stories that strike my fancy...

Will Apple take a bite out of concert tickets, thanks to Ping?

As all of the world has reported, Apple yesterday announced Ping, it's new social feature within iTunes 10. Now I know not everybody is excited about it for various reasons, even one person saying that Ping is like "having a social network in prison."

But sharing your musical tastes and preferences in other social networks / media like Facebook and Twitter have been awkward. Blip.fm and other services are okay, but none are integrated well. Ping itself is a little quirky but those wrinkles will be ironed out. So I definitely think that it begins to fill a void.

But now that the void is being filled, what's next?

I would be shocked if Apple does not get into the concert ticket selling business. Not only could they bundle together concert tickets with albums or songs, but Ping would then allow users to share with their "friends" which shows they are going to. It seems to me (with no factual basing what so ever) that fewer and fewer people are attending concerts. This could change if these shows became more of a social community event than an individual fan's experience.

Within iTunes, there could even be a calendar feature built that would show you upcoming shows and which ones your friends are attending. And with certain artists already on Ping, it could explode pretty quickly. They could update fans on the tour, post pictures of previous shows, etc.

Right now, Ping is isolated solely to iTunes, but that's going to change for it to be successful. If a customer purchases a ticket, iTunes will have to allow them to share that message their friends and followers on Facebook and Twitter. It would be to Apple's benefit. Eventbrite, an event registration site, already does a great job of letting users promote their registration so it's not groundbreaking territory at all.

And next imagine an integration with Foursquare to where you check in at the show and get special privileges or badges while there, which would be huge with big festivals.

So it's yet to be seen if Apple will begin selling tickets to concerts, but they've laid the groundwork to begin doing so. And I know that not everybody is a fan of Apple, but it's hard to argue with their success at integration.

Anybody have Steve Jobs' phone number?

LinkedIn lost its chance...

Facebook is the primary social network on which consumer-focused companies maintain one or more profiles, cited by 83 percent of respondents compared with 45 percent for Twitter. Business-to-business companies maintain a presence on both social sites with 77 percent maintaining a profile on Facebook and 73 percent on Twitter.

Among those using social media for business purposes in their jobs, 62 percent visit company or brand profiles on social networking sites and 55 percent search for business information on these sites.

Use-of-Social-Media
via webpronews.com

It's interesting that a higher percentage of B2B companies have a Twitter profile, compared to B2C companies. I would have flip-flopped the two.

LinkedIn had a chance to be THE place for businesses but just simply dropped the ball. That's my "expert" evaluation.

Facebook Users Spend 8 Billion Minutes/Day on the Site

Facebook’s 300 million users collectively spend more than 8 billion minutes on the site each day, according to the social network’s VP of engineering, Mike Schroepfer. He offered up the number onstage at the Web 2.0 Summit Wednesday as proof of the infrastructure challenges the social network faces relative to other web sites. On a busy day, an eye-popping 1.2 million photos are served on Facebook each second, he added.

And the more than 15,000 sites that have integrated Facebook Connect mean the site has API demands it has to address, too. Facebook was accessed via its API 5 billion times yesterday alone, according to Schroepfer.

To accommodate all that data without damaging the user experience and stifling innovation, Schroepfer said Facebook has rewritten its memcache multiple times so that now deploys five times faster than before. But even though Facebook continues to augment its engineering team to keep up with its growing audience, he said there’s 1.2 million users per Facebook engineer. No wonder the company is looking to expand its staff by 40-50 percent this year.

 

via gigaom.com

8 billion minutes? Holy Cow!