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?

No, this post isn't about URL shorteners. . . but it could be. And that's the point.

When I spoke at Blog Indiana, part of my presentation was to be open about where blog topics might come from. Conversations with customers, songs from the radio. . . you never know.

But to show you were this blog post came from, follow the Twitter trail between Jay Baer and me. It started innocently like this...

And since I don't even take myself seriously all that often, I replied with this... (Who doesn't appreciate a good Rick Moranis blog post every now and then?)

And Jay played along with this Tweet (nice reference to Rick Moranis' character in Ghostbusters)...

With which I replied...

And there you have a good topic to write about (URL shorteners) with a great headline.

Sometimes, it's all about the headline.