The difference in a nutshell:
Analyst Michael Gartenberg sums it up nicely on Twitter: “Apple and Google taking two different approaches. Google wants input one. Will never get it. Apple wants input two and might.”
He’s referring to the input jacks on your TV set. Google is trying to replace your cable box or satellite TV box as “input one.” That’s really ambitious, and a big risk. Apple wants “input two,” where your DVD player is today, or your PlayStation. That seems more attainable.
Ping, the right service at the right time:
It makes perfect sense for a music service to be social… The popularity YouTube, the fast-growing MOG and the sadly defunct iLike and Imeem show that people gravitate towards music as a common, collective experience…
Ping…can tell me who my friends think are cool and the top 10 favorites of people in my social graph. Some of my friends are famous deejays. Others just have eclectic musical tastes. They can collectively sift through over 10 million songs and help with the discovery of music…
Apple received much of this social capability with the acquisition of Lala, an online music service, which as a standalone company used sharing of social objects to drive folks towards paid music downloads. Now Apple is only closing the loop by further sharing what users bought.
The magic of FaceTime is the other camera—the one on the rear of the phone.
FaceTime turns your phone into a live videofeed.
So instead of seeing you, the other person on the call can see what you’re seeing. I expect people to use FaceTime when they go to concerts, meetings, or the zoo. (“Look, Grandma, Timmy’s taunting the tiger!”) Another inevitable development will be a FaceTime equivalent of the iPhone’s Send to YouTube video option: a one-click way to share your current reality with the world.
This makes everybody a potential live-video broadcaster.
Overall, the rumors and predictions around yesterday’s event were pretty accurate.