New Apple Ping for ITunes 10 Reaches 1 Million Users in First 48 Hours

Apple announced in a statement Friday their new social music sharing site Ping had reached over 1 million users in the first 48 hours the site was up and running.

The announcement is good news for Apple who announced the Ping project earlier this year to excited reviews and anticipation on the internet and the future of music buying online.

Apple Vice President of Internet Services Eddy Cue said in the press release, "One-third of the people who have downloaded iTunes 10 have joined Ping." Cue went on to say Apple expects even more people to join the Ping network in the coming weeks as more and more users download iTunes 10.

At a keynote held Wednesday in Seattle, Apple CEO Steve Jobs described Ping as a musical social network, "sort of like Facebook and Twitter meet iTunes." Users of Ping have the ability to follow artists and friends they know in real life or through online Social Networks. You will also be able to see a real time report of what your friends and favorite artists are buying through Ping or listening to at that moment.

Apple Computers already had a widely successful product with the original iTunes, which currently boasts over 160 million users in 23 countries. Initial surveys and test markets for Ping proved the network already had a ready audience when it was launched. Users to iTunes will need to opt-in to the Ping service after downloading the latest version of iTunes through Apple's online website.

But Ping didn't launch Wednesday without its share of critics who complained the network "stole the show" and questioned the need for yet another social network after seeing how quickly people can abandon and delete social networks like MySpace, Friendster and Facebook. Critics also called to question the name closely resembling the popular search engine Bing from Microsoft.

Labeled as a "social music discovery" service, Ping originally had a Facebook Connect option for finding friends, but the feature was disabled during the beta testing phase. Steve Jobs said in an interview Wednesday that the terms Facebook wanted to impose on Apple to use the social network were "onerous."

Apple went on to say that while they have over 1 million users on the Ping network they don't believe all of them are legitimate human users. Just hours after Ping launched, Apple found spammers had already begun posting links advertising free iPhones and iPads in exchange for signing up for a Ping account. Numerous fake celebrity accounts have also been created since the launch and Apple is in the process of confirming the accounts and deleting the bogus ones.