Publish your iTunes habits

Want something different from Apple? Then this might be something for you then: Apple has started a new service that lets you embed a widget into your website showing what songs you’ve recently purchased/reviewed/favorized songs from the iTunes Store and named it My iTunes.

When I first heard of it, I thought it might be something similar to the widget offered by services like Last.fm or Virb showing what music you’re listening to but no. It is completely focused on your purchasing history from iTunes, which is in my opinion somehow useless to other people …

I just went through the activation just to see how it works anyway and well … it’s a little bit weird. You do everything within iTunes. When you follow the sign-in link on the MyiTunes site, iTunes opens up and you have to activate this service like you did for example with iTunes Plus. There you also have to agree to a Privacy Policy and also agree that Apple can use your purchase history for this.

Then comes the part where you can select, which services should be available to you: Purchases, Favorites and Reviews. When you select one of these, you get a new button to give you the HTML-code to be embedded into your site … which opens a new window of your browser.

But My iTunes doesn’t only offer you those Flash widgets but also an Atom feed containing their data :)

In general it looks like a nice idea but I somehow don’t see why you would publish your purchases over what you’re actually listening to. Only the reviews and perhaps the favorite artists make sense in my opinion. Anyway: It’s nice to see that Apple makes some tentative steps into what the web is right now.

But this shows once again, that Apple naturally has your complete purchase history but for one reason or another doesn’t want you to be able to re-download a song if you lost it.

[via futurezone]

All screenshots taken from the My iTunes and activation page.