Apple have just released iTunes 10, and with the addition of Ping – it’s given them the chance to dip their toes into social media. I’ve only had a short amount of time to play with Ping and from what I can see it’s seems like a very closed network – restricting itself to just iTunes, there was supposed to be an option to connect and find your Facebook friends – but this was removed on launch. Now the only way to find friends is to search by name – which is a little hit and miss. Also, there’s no short vanity style URL that you can point your friends towards, although there is a work around;

• From the Ping menu in the iTunes store, use the drop down and click on ‘My Profile’.
• Right Click (Option + Click) on your name at the top of the page, you’ll access a small menu – click on ‘Copy Link’.
• You now have a direct URL link to your profile that when clicked on will open iTunes and view your profile page, allowing people to easily find and follow you. The URL looks something like this;
  http://c.itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZConnections.woa/wa/viewProfile?userId=114837797
• As the link isn’t exactly very short or easy to remember, I logged into my bit.ly account and created a custom short URL; http://bit.ly/pingmartinlucas – much better.

At the moment the network seems very geared towards the masses, initial recommendations are the same for everyone – so along with everyone else I was directed to follow artists such as Lady Gaga, U2 and Jack Johnson. It’s a shame that Apple couldn’t give me a more tailored set of artists to follow – they know enough about my music purchasing and listening habits to understand that I wouldn’t want to follow any of these people.

There were also some teething problems with uploading a photo, after multiple attempts my photo wotuld not upload. I searched Twitter to see if anyone else had the same problem (many did), and some had a solution – using a 250 x 250 pixel image, this seemed to work and my image is now awaiting approval online!

At the moment and for me, Ping isn’t going to replace LastFM as a recommendation engine as it’s tricky to find people who are into the same music as I am, but I think it could still work out very well for Apple. If Ping encourages people to review and ‘like’ releases on the iTunes store – it could lead to more purchases. There was a case study (in Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point I believe) where by a certain number of reviews on an Amazon product page was able to influence people in to making a purchase, I’m sure 27 was the magic number, they didn’t all have to be positive reviews either. Once a product has 27 or more reviews the purchase rate starts to substantially increase.

I’m definitely tempted to review a couple of recent purchases, just to get some content into my own Ping stream, and if this creates a cycle where I get more followers then I could stick with Ping.

So if Ping is your thing, you can follow me here; http://bit.ly/pingmartinlucas

Homescreen.me is a new website, currently in beta at the moment, so invite only (my invite came through within a couple of weeks). All you do is upload a capture of a screen from either your iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad and include a description – this provides a nice way to display your current set of favourite or most used applications.

Here’s mine; http://homescreen.me/martinlucas

I’m not sure how far this website can go, it’s pretty static at the moment as there’s no way to share your screens (via Twitter, Facebook etc), no RSS feed for a user, or the ability to follow other Homescreen.me users – which would be a nice way of finding new apps. I’m sure additional features will get added to the site in the future. Also an app would be handy so you could upload your screen grabs straight from your iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch, instead I took the screen grab and emailed it to myself to upload.

I’ve just started a Facebook Fan Page, so if you’re on the World’s biggest social network – you can follow and receive website design based updates from me in your newsfeed. I’ll be posting information about the projects I’m working on, as well as news and blog posts that I think will be helpful to website owners and fellow designers. Just follow the link below and sign up by clicking the ‘like’ button.

facebook.com/websitedesignbymartinlucas

You can also find me on Twitter if that’s your preferred network; @martinlucas.

I’ve been called an attention seeker a couple of times over the last few months, and I’m not 100% sure that it fits into my character. Close friends think I’m the exact opposite – fairly shy actually. But if you look at what I get up to online, then an attention seeker I might be.

The 70 odd friends on facebook will probably testify that they know exactly what I’m doing at any given time, as facebook allows you to import ‘feeds’ from other social websites such as digg, flickr and twitter. So via their news feed they see what I’m currently doing via twitter.com – as this updates my facebook status, they see the websites that I’m viewing when I create a book mark at del.cio.us, or when a news items get dugg at digg.com, recently taken photographs get published to flickr and blipfoto.com and the music I’m listening to gets listed via the scrubbling function at last.fm.

All these websites, added together and tracking my habits would definitely allow anyone to see what i’m up to during the day. but, there is one additional piece of information that would be vital to stalking that is not currently getting monitored – my location. there is one piece of technology that would i love to own that would do this for me – an apple iphone. geo-tagging your photographs is already possible with the right camera – the longitude / latitude is embedded into the jpeg’s EXIF data, some twitter application on the iphone will record your location, and there are some micro-blogging sites such as brightkite.com that make your location and geo-tagging the major part of it’s service.

So, in the future – and not the distant future – it will be a case of what am i doing, what am i listening to, what am i reading and where am i doing all these things.

TwitThis allows you to add a link to your website or blog so that people can tweet about your site through their own twitter account. Combining the same idea as digg.com and delicious where people vote for the content websites, and twitter where people inform followers what they are currently doing – and many do inform their follows of interesting websites that have been found.

TwitThis makes it easy for website owners to make it easy for Twitter users to tweet about their site.

Check it out here; www.twitthis.com

twistori.com is a great example of what the twitter api can be used for, it serves no real purpose – but can be incredibly addictive. select one of the six keywords (love, hate, think, believe, feel, wish) and watch the tweets flow up the screen as the application searches through all the tweets being made in realtime.

this is the first of what will hopefully be a comprehensive list of twitter tools and advise to help your twittering improve. i’ve been using twitter for just over a year (http://twitter.com/martinlucas), it didn’t take long for me to become hooked into what i think is the best social network on the web today.

the first tool is the one i use the most. in my opinion it’s the best os x twitter client – it’s twitterific. the reason twitterific works so well is because it’s simple, it would be very easy to over-complicate an application like this adding lots of various settings and added features (see tweetdeck for example), but icon factory have created an application that gets the job done and is a pleasure to use. there’s also an iphone version for those that have one and want to twitter on the move.