http://www.podcastingnews.com/2009/11/26/apple-opens-itunes-lp-itunes-extras/

“Apple’s last closed music platform” my foot. It is both open *and* documented.

Undocumented isn’t really the same as proprietary. “Proprietary” is generally used to mean patented, internal processes that other people aren’t allowed to use from a legal or licensing standpoint. Undocumented means nobody else knows how to do it, but nobody is stopping them from learning.

There is plenty of open-source software with documentation so shockingly bad it may as well not exist. That does not make it proprietary, it just means that the coders haven’t bothered to tell anyone else how everything works. WebM is an unfortunate example of this. Large parts of the “specification” are raw code. That is the very definition of undocumented functionality. Code never substitutes for proper documentation.

And yeah, if they added iTunes LP creation capabilities to, say, iWeb (since the iTunes LP files are just zipped web pages), it would be a lot more interesting. As it stands, they have to be created by hand, and that’s kind of tedious. The files can contain a good bit more than iWeb can create, though.

What would be really awesome is if they extended the format to let people make a full web application in a bottle. Then make it so you can sync them to an iOS device that would render it as a local web application using the built-in browser’s capabilities. So far, they’re pretty much DVD-style menus for audio albums and extra content like lyrics and liner notes. A change like this could make them so much more, and it’s not far off from what they are already.

But needing to know undocumented stuff to do iTunes Lp sounds a lot like needing proprietary knowledge!

If they’d supported iTunes LP seriously, it might have been interesting, don’t you think?

I think Ping is silly, but mostly because I find “social networking” silly. MySpace is the new Geocities, complete with garish text over horrible floating background images and MIDI music. They may as well emulate the blink tag with Flash.

Facebook is the stuff of nightmares. I had an account with nothing related to work in it. No work friends. No listed interests even remotely related to my day job. After adding my family, none of whom work in any field related to my day job, the recommended friends list had six coworkers and a customer I talked to twice several years ago. When I saw that, I couldn’t find the delete function fast enough.

Twitter makes it impossible to have coherent conversation because everyone interrupts me between each sentence with a question I just answered in the sentence I was writing when they were replying to my last one. It’s infuriating. I’ve gotten to the point that I don’t even look at my mentions, I just use it to broadcast show times and the like.

Also, strictly speaking, the article is wrong about iTunes LP. It isn’t closed per-se, it’s just undocumented. Anyone can make one. It’s not hard. Just a lot of HTML junk in a zip file. “Closed” generally means you need some proprietary technology or knowledge to make it.

Zimmie – does anybody even remember iTunes LP? Seriously.

For the Apple fanboys – Ping isn’t as good as MySpace. MySpace!

Complete FAIL.

WTF?

The lack of podcast support is big FAIL to me, too. It would be great to see the top podcasts the fans of your favorite podcast listen to, for example.

And the site was recommending Lady Gaga and U2 to me, which completely ignores the music in my iTunes collection.

Ping’s lack of external connections (Twitter, Facebook, etc.) makes it much less interesting to use. Perhaps they’ll add this functionality down the road.

Ping’s lack of support for podcasting is discouraging as well. Considering the varied types of media (music, video, iBooks, podcasts, etc.) that are now distributed through the iTunes Store, it seems likely that eventually Ping support will be added to everything, not just music. I hope so, anyway.

That said, unless podcasters are able to claim their shows and use ping in that way, I have no use for it. Do I really need another social network to maintain? And one that is completely centered around my buying habits on iTunes? Nope.