My iTunes: Apple Launches iTunes Widgets

Sunisa 08-10-2007

A surprisingly open move for a company that’s normally closed: Apple has just launched My iTunes, a series of embeddable widgets to post your iTunes purchases, iTunes reviews and iTunes favorites to your blog or profile page. The drawback: the widgets don’t actually play any music, they simply list artists and songs with links back to iTunes.

The purchases widget displays the videos, TV shows and movies you’ve purchased from iTunes, while the reviews widget shows the media you’ve given a 4 or 5-star rating to. The favorites widget, meanwhile, displays the artists you’ve purchased most. There are 5 color schemes - all of them shades of blue or black - and you need to click Enable My iTunes in your iTunes Store to start producing the RSS feeds required for My iTunes to work.

There are already a few services that grab your iTunes listening habits to share with others (MOG, for instance), but most are advanced enough that these simple widgets won’t have any effect on their popularity. Who knows, maybe some will even be able to leverage the feeds being produced by My iTunes.

Raven

I'm really not sure what to think about this. Seems like apple is trying to make itune more invitable to people by adding some features to it. The idea is pretty good but I rather them just reduce the resources it takes to use the damn thing. Maybe even design a basic skin to cutdown on video resources. I don't use itunes mostly becuase everything it can do Winamp does the samething and is ALOT more customizable and alot less resource needing.

Nina

Apple doesn't want to open up too much. Right now they feel pretty secure since they don't allow 3rd party productions. This is there testing to see exactly how faw they should go. Its not anything to make it worth it just testing the waters.

Hsoolien

They're going to be opened wide up by full Unix compliance with their next OS release. I know many a *nix nerd slathering to get their hands on it.