At a keynote speech held yesterday, Apple CEO Steve Jobs introduced iTunes 10 with Ping, a new music-oriented platform which is designed to give the company an edge into the lucrative social networking market. 

 

iTunes Ping lets users post their thoughts and opinions, favorite albums and songs, the music they’ve downloaded from iTunes as well as concert listings within the iTunes player. 

 

“iTunes is the number one music community in the world, with over 160 million iTunes users in 23 countries, and now we’re adding social networking with Ping,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “With Ping you can follow your favorite artists and friends and join a worldwide conversation with music’s most passionate fans.”

 

Ping allows users to follow their favorite artists to see what they’re up to, check out photos and videos they’ve posted, see their tour dates and read comments about other artists and albums they’re listening to. 

 

In addition, users will also be able to create a profile on iTunes to let friends know who they are following. Ping’s Recent Activity feed will also display friends posts about artists, albums, songs and concerts, plus a consolidated Top 10 list of the songs and albums which friends and the artists they follow are downloading from iTunes. 

 

Ping will also be available on the iPhone and iPod Touch.

 

In addition to these features, iTunes 10 will also incorporate support for wireless speaker sets. 

 

Traditionally, Apple has a history of dominating the environments it makes forays into. If this is the case with Ping then other music centric social networking platforms such as Last.FM and MySpace would do well to take heed.