Twitter and iTunes Ping Join Forces to Make Discovering Music More Fun

The folks at Twitter, the microblogging service, have announced that Apple has added integration with the service in Ping, the Mac maker’s social network geared towards music. The move will see Ping posts tweeted on users’ Twitter feeds with links to the music on iTunes.

“Every day, millions of people use Twitter to follow and share what they care about,” Kevin Thau, of the Business & Corporate Development team at Twitter, writes. “Twitter users now send over 95 million Tweets a day, many of which are about the music they're listening to.”

Kevin reveals that, “Starting today Ping, iTunes' new social network for music, and Twitter are making it even easier for people to share music discoveries with their friends by putting Ping activity, song previews and links to purchase and download music from the iTunes Store right in their Tweets on Twitter.com.”

Basically, it works like this.

Users can now employ Ping to easily link to their Twitter account and instantly find Ping subscribers among the people they already follow on the microblogging service.

Once the accounts have been linked, this activity will be tweeted to the user’s Twitter followers, whenever they Post, Like, Review, or tell their friends why they bought a song or album.

The feature also integrates with the iTunes song-preview function, and allows links to be embedded to purchase and download music from iTunes.

“When you click on a Tweet that's sent via Ping or that contains an iTunes link, you'll see the song or album in Twitter’s details pane, with the ability to listen to song previews from iTunes, making the experience even richer,” Kevin explains.

He notes that iTunes song previews are available on Twitter.com in the 23 countries where the iTunes Store offers music.

Apple’s iTunes Ping has not had a very promising start, despite Apple reporting over 1 million subscribers in the first 48 hours since the service went live.