To be entirely honest, I’m not sure we need another social network. I’m almost sure we don’t need another, but that didn’t stop Apple from trying to fill the gap where MySpace has arguably failed. MySpace, when it was new and shiny and people still used it, was a great resource for local bands to get fans and groupies. They could release music, tour photos, and whatnot, and a lot of people used it for that function. However, it’s really gone the way of Friendster, and has fallen into disrepair. Possibly it’s because most people who “designed” sites on MySpace enabled auto-playing of horrible music, and had flashing crap all over their pages that made me think I was about to have a tonic–clonic seizure.

Regardless, Apple has decided to have a go at the social networking thing, and as they have few hundred million iTunes users in the world, they do have a pretty good start. However, they have to convince people to use the service. So, I’ve got a few suggestions:

1. Allow users to like imported music – that is, music they have ripped from their collection. It’s incredibly irritating to try to setup the “music I like” icons if the album you want isn’t on the store yet.
2. Allow users to mark albums they have imported as purchased in the iTunes Music Store. This is a partial fix for the previous complaint: I don’t want iTunes to recommend something to me for purchase that I’ve already imported and setup with correct metadata.
3. Allow users to “follow” any artist on the store – even if the artist doesn’t have a profile setup yet. They Might Be Giants don’t have a profile as of yet, but I’d like to be able to say “hey, I like these guys enough to follow album releases and whatever.” Can’t do it until they set it up, which is really frustrating.
4. Allow a finer-grained control of who can see what – I don’t want to show everyone my musical purchases, but I’m ok showing them the bands I like. I’d really like to have the ability to create groups to put people in, and be able to adjust privacy settings for each group.

Well, that’s all for now. I’m sure I’ve got more good ideas for Apple to ignore in here somewhere.