Reinventing Viral Technologies

Apple presented a line of revised iPods at a San Francisco press event; the revamps included the iPod Shuffle as well as the classic iPod and iPod Touch which received minor design upgrades. The iPod Touch is thinner now has a curved iPhone-like back.

The biggest changes were to the iPod Nano, making it the thinnest Apple iPod ever made. It returns to a similar, vertical design of the earlier, second generation Nano, returning to a screen format that would allow it to share some applications of the iPhone and iPod Touch. The new Nano will have a particular focus on games, in order to increase potential sales on the already successful Apps store.

The Nano does not benefit from a touch screen, but does have a newly added accelerometer, to add more fun navigation of songs and albums. Simply shake the iPod and it will produce a different shuffle of songs.

All of the iPods are cheaper than their predecessors, and have larger storage capacity, with Apple hoping to capitalize on sale from the iTunes store. The store also got an upgrade with support for High Definition TV shows, a new way of displaying albums, and a neat functionality that enables iTunes to build automatic playlists of similar music. The software can analyze the songs in your library and recommend similar or new songs from the iTunes store. This ‘Genius’ playlist is described as having the world's best DJ in your iPod. In fact, the iPod Touch and Nanos actually come with the functionality built into them.

Always looking for more ways to increase the sale of songs, this new function is sure to prove fun and useful for users, as well as helping generate more sales.

All this is great, but Apple still seems to be missing out on many other social media ideas that could really take iTunes to the next level.