Apple's Ping adds support for collaborative, social playlists

Ping, Apple's music-centered social network, has received an update that may make your iTunes-based music listening just a tad more social. You can now create playlists of your favorite songs -- which you can make public to your Ping followers. They can then rate or review any of your public playlists, and, even collaborate on public playlists with you -- provided that you tick the necessary box when you create a playlist.

To create a playlist, click on the Ping icon in the iTunes sidebar, and go to your profile page. Then look for the Playlists section on the right side and click 'Create a New Playlist'. Once there, you can give your playlist a title, a description, and perhaps tick the aforementioned 'Allow people who follow me to add songs' option if you so wish. Songs can be reordered at any time, even after you've made your playlist public. You can also import an existing iTunes playlist by simply clicking its title, then the arrow icon, and in the dialog box that appears, selecting 'Publish playlist'.

The songs inside a playlist can only come from the iTunes store. There's absolutely no support for adding your own MP3 collection, but that's to be expected from Apple.

While the new feature addition is nice, it probably should have been there when Ping launched. Apple has been gradually adding a little bit here and a little bit there to its social network, but it remains to be seen whether the pace at which they're updating Ping will prove fast enough for people to stick around and actually use it.