December 20, 2010

Make Playlists With Your Friends On Ping

You can create and publish playlists that your followers on Ping can interact with and add to. Begin the playlist directly in Ping with the "Create a New Playlist" link or start from a playlist you've already created in iTunes (limit of 100 tracks). Create a list of favorite holiday songs with friends and family near and far. Put together "what we were listening to when" collections with old friends. Keep a running "song of the year" list with the friends you share your musical life with.

To begin with a playlist already in your iTunes library, select it and click the arrow to the right of the name. That will produce a page in Ping that lists all the songs in your playlist that are currently available in the Store. You can subtract and add songs as you choose and click Publish to make the playlist available to all your followers on Ping to enjoy, and if you enabled it, to contribute songs themselves. As they add songs, a column will appear to the left of the tracks, listing the contributor's name for each song. And as you and your friends create playlists, they'll appear in a Ping Playlists section in the column on the right (just below Ping Charts), which also contains the "Create a New Playlist" link.

Get your friends to join the Ping Playlist party by using the "Invite friends by email" link in the Find People section on the right side of the Ping page. If you use MobileMe, Windows Live, Yahoo, or AOL, you'll be able to log into your account and see which of your contacts are already on Ping, and you can also select the addresses you want to send invitations to. And, of course, you can type in email addresses directly.