Sure, government officials and politicians may use the data, but who really cares if there were 71 million fixed broadband connections at the end of June, 2009? Likewise, the fact that nearly 41 million folks used cable broadband that long ago is pretty much worthless.

I’m not sure why the FCC even bothers to collect this data if it can’t release it sooner. It’s nice to have the data, but it’s just not useful so late in the game. The only place where 14-month old stats make any sense is in a baseball fantasy league. Yup, those stats made me pick Boston Red Sox pitcher Josh Beckett  for my 2010 fantasy team. Fat lot of good that did.

If FCC wants to build a case for better broadband, I personally feel that they should try to collect data faster and deliver it faster than any research firm. Otherwise, they should outsource to commercial research companies that can do the job faster. Why not use that information? Unless I’m missing a big point, it seems there isn’t that much of a variation: The FCC says at the end of the second quarter of 2009 there were 71 million broadband subscribers. Research from Leichtman Research Group, which doesn’t include satellite, Internet connections puts the number at around 70 million.

PS: In case you want to know, at the end of June 2010, there were about 73.5 million broadband subscribers, according to the Leichtman Research Group.

Related GigaOM Pro Content (sub req’d): Who Will Profit From Broadband Innovation?

I tweeted about my addiction and folks from Rovio Mobile, the Helsinki, Finland-based creator of the app got back to me. I ended up inviting CEO Mikael Hed and Peter Vesterbacka, who is cutely titled Mighty Eagle (a forthcoming character), to our offices and we talked about Angry Birds, which has been sold 7 million times and may turn into an entertainment franchise to rival SpongeBob. There are rumors of a movie. A line of soft toys is definitely in the works.

Hed, Vesterbacka I talked about how the seven-year-old company became an overnight success and he offered tips to become a top iPhone developer. While you watch the video, I’m going back to playing level 6!

Related GigaOM Pro Content:

• Needed: A Neiman Marcus for Mobile Apps
• Will Killer Apps Affect Which Handsets Consumers Buy?

The anarchic online community known as 4chan isn’t known for doing things that are cute and heart-warming. In fact, the site is mostly known for posting sophomoric humor and graphic sexual imagery, and when the members of its most popular discussion board — known as /b/ — go after someone, it’s typically to subject them to ridicule and/or make them miserable. But not today. Today, someone at 4chan decided that the Internet should get together and wish 90-year-old WWII veteran William J. Lashua a happy birthday, and by lunchtime, his local branch of the American Legion said that they had heard from people as far away as Sweden.

It’s not clear how 4chan originally came across a photo of Mr. Lashua, but a member of the site posted a snapshot (embedded below) of a flyer that was posted on the bulletin board at the local Legion in Mr. Lashua’s hometown of Ashburnham, Mass. The flyer asked for guests to attend the nonagenarian’s birthday on Sept. 4 at the Legion hall. Whether it was the 4chan member’s call to “make this guy the happiest person ever for a day,” or the fact that Mr. Lashua looks a bit like a real-life version of the grumpy old man from Pixar’s popular animated movie “Up,” the post took off.

From 4chan — which has given birth to most of the Internet “memes” that many users are likely familiar with, including LOLcats and the RickRoll — the idea spread to other social networking sites such as Reddit, as well as Tumblr and even Facebook. A recent check showed that the account someone set up for Mr. Lashua’s birthday had 3,956 “likes” and over 500 comments, most of which were wishing him a happy birthday and thanking him for his military service. Someone on Reddit noted that in contrast to their usual behavior, 4chan members “were giving him nice phone calls and sending him nice notes” and discouraging those who wanted to do something stupid or mean. “They were all being.. well, shucks… awful nice.”

The bar manager at Mr. Lashua’s local branch of the Legion — a woman named Linda who said she knows the 90-year-old well — told me in a brief phone interview that she’d received almost 100 calls from people as far away as Switzerland, Japan and Sweden, and that she planned to put together a collage of all the places that had sent in birthday wishes. She added that a lot of the people phoning had given her the impression that they thought Mr. Lashua didn’t have many friends or family, and that’s why he was advertising for people to come to his party. “But that’s not true,” the manager said. “He has a big family, and lots of friends. It’s still nice to hear from so many people though.”

In addition to putting together the collage for Mr. Lashua, Linda might want to put together some extra chairs as well — a number of 4chan members, Reddit readers and Facebook fans said that they live near Massachusetts and are planning to make the drive there for the festivities. It remains to be seen what the WWII vet thinks of strangers showing up at his birthday party saying they heard about him on the Internet.

Although 4chan is known for plenty of unpleasant incidents, including the recent case involving a teenager who uploaded her videos to YouTube and was targeted by the site, Mr. Lashua’s birthday isn’t the first time the site has engaged in something more positive: 4chan users have been instrumental in tracking down people involved in animal abuse cases, such as the girl who recently threw a puppy into a river and uploaded the video to YouTube. Embedded below is a video presentation that 4chan founder Christopher Poole — known to users as Moot — did at the TED conference about the benefits of anonymity in online communities.

Related GigaOM Pro Content (sub req’d): Why Google Should Fear the Social Web

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Pink Sherbet Photography

Neilsen estimates that by this time next year, half the U.S. population will have a smartphone, and during the second quarter of this year, folks consumed an average of 230 MB of data on their handsets, up by 50 percent from the year before according to data from Chetan Sharma. The opportunity that was once owned by carriers has now opened up to an entire ecosystem of hardware and app vendors that also hope to profit. We’ve selected 10 of those companies with hopes for building a mobile business below. Check them out now, and come see them at Mobilize 2010 in San Francisco, Calif. on Sept. 30.

AdelaVoice is using voice and speech recognition technologies to create a better, interactive relationship between people and their devices.

FeedHenry provides a cloud platform for building and deploying consumer and enterprise apps that can run on all smartphones, social media sites and browsers from a single code base.

Jiepang is the leading mobile location-based social networking service in China, similar to Foursquare in the U.S.

Micello is akin to Google Maps inside a building, and hopes to take the location-based services market to the micro-local level.

Netmobo provides a platform that allows mobile developers to exploit new revenue models through flexible pricing, charging, payment and customer usage controls.

SpiderCloud Wireless has developed an enterprise Radio Access Network to help mobile operators address coverage and capacity issues inside the enterprise with new hardware.

Spork, a location-based application that turns every street corner into a personalized menu of dishes and drinks based on trusted recommendations and reviews.

Unity Technologies offers Unity, its game development platform for creating highly interactive 3-D content on mobile, web and console.

Visiarc offers push mail & mobile document sharing in the cloud with unique remote mobile attachment handling.

Vive is a social recommendations start-up within Qualcomm Services Labs that enables viral word of mouth between friends and Vive users across fragmented platforms.

Mobilize 2010 is a high-level meeting-of-the-minds where executives and entrepreneurs from app companies, carriers, service providers, infrastructure companies and technology firms will come together with leading media and venture investors to discuss pressing issues in the mobile industry. The LaunchPad program highlights those companies and products that are seizing the opportunities and filling gaps in the rapidly evolving mobile industry. The entire agenda and speaker roster can be found here.

Join us at Mobilize 2010. Register today.

If you don’t count the ol’ iPod Classic, Apple completely revamped the iPod line yesterday at its annual music event. The shuffle saw the return of buttons, while the nano is a miniature multi-touch marvel that can apparently double as a fancy watch in a pinch. Then there’s the iPod touch, which is now the most popular iPod model of all, thanks to support for apps and web browsing. On the surface, it looks like the new touch is everything one would want in a contract-free iPhone 4 without cellular voice support. I would say that it’s close, but not quite.

I will give Apple credit, as it found a way to cram more iPhone 4 features into the new touch, even as it kept price points the same. The new touch enjoys the 960 x 640 “retina display,” an Apple A4 chip and two cameras, both of which support Apple’s FaceTime video calling feature. That said, however, there are still three missing features that make the new touch close to, but not on par with, a contract-free iPhone 4.

Location, location, location! There’s still no GPS chip in the iPod touch. Instead, the device will use available Wi-Fi networks to triangulate a location, just as it does on the iPad Wi-Fi model I own. That method actually works reasonably well, but of course, requires the touch to be connected to a hotspot. So much for check-ins on Foursquare or finding local points-of-interest if there’s no Wi-Fi to be found.

Just give me data. Unlike the iPad, Apple chose not to offer a 3G radio option in the touch, likely to keep the device thin. To be as mobile as the iPhone, features such a radio and a microSIM slot would have been a nice offer. Data plans could have been month-to-month for those that want them, although an option like this would surely boost the price of the device; it’s a $130 option in the iPad, for example. The touch has always been limited to Wi-Fi, so this is nothing new, but again, it’s a key difference between the touch and the iPhone.

2003 called and wants its camera back. Yes, the new touch has a front-facing VGA camera and a sensor on the back too. That rear camera even shoots high-definition, 720p video, just like the iPhone, but don’t even think to compare the rear shooter to that of the 5 megapixel camera on the iPhone 4. Stills from the iPod touch are a lowly 960 x 720, which works out to just under 0.7 megapixels. A solid shot like the one to the right taken by my son with his iPhone 4 isn’t happening on the new touch. Pics will look fine from the touch for posting on social networking sites and such, but blowing them up is going to be a painful experience, as details will lose definition faster than you can say “one more thing.”

I raised these kinds of points prior to Apple’s new product announcement, saying that the touch will never have all of the same features as an iPhone because the phone bits allow Apple to enjoy a $600 average selling price per handset. The phone costs less than half that to manufacture and consumers in the U.S. pay $199 or $299 for the device. Apple receives a carrier subsidy to make up the difference between the ASP and the price a customer pays.  What incentive then, does Apple have to make an iPod touch equal to an iPhone — minus cellular voice, that is — when it will earn less profit per device? As long as we’re on a subsidy model for handsets, Apple has no incentive to do so.

Having said that, the new iPod touch is close enough to an iPhone 4 for me personally, and probably many others who already have a smartphone. I’ve pre-ordered a 32 GB model that I’ll carry with my Google Android phone. My phone has a 5 megapixel camera for better stills and I’ll use the free Wi-Fi hotspot feature to get my iPod touch online during my travels. Looks like Apple is making money from me, even though it still doesn’t offer a contract-free iPhone 4 in the touch!

Related GigaOM Pro Content:

10 Mobile Predictions for 2010

Here’s a lightly edited transcript of our conversation:

GigaOM: V4 had been in development since before you joined the company nine months ago and you’d invited tons of beta testers. So why wasn’t it ready for primetime?

Keval Desai: You’re right, it had been around for some time — over a year. A critique was that Digg was slow in launching things, so we wanted to get to a platform that we could launch quickly on. So we went from a SQL database to NoSQL, and did a lot of other things in the stack using open source and other technologies.

This is a massive platform that serves millions of people, where if I’m following you, and you Digg a story, it immediately pops up for me, and if I have 10 followers it goes to them as well, and it’s an instant nuclear reaction. That’s a feature that I don’t think most Internet companies are trying to attempt. I think we’re trying to attempt something very innovative and it carries some technical risk.

As you know, we ran the product in beta for almost a couple of months, and it was running and in parallel to our existing platform. But the beta product was invitation-only, so we didn’t have full load until launch. At launch, we saw higher traffic than on Digg.com on the previous version — from renewed interest or people who had never heard of us who came for the first time. The second thing that happened is that the entire technical stack, some of which was fairly new, finally felt the brunt of the traffic, and saw some stress points that we didn’t see in our load-testing. But every day, the site gets more and more stable. We still have stability issues that I do want to acknowledge, but I think we are reacting. Since we launched, we’ve had more than 100 incremental launches — bug fixes, stability patches — and that speaks to the capability of the new platform.

GigaOM: Do you think Digg users would have revolted against anything you launched?

Desai: I wouldn’t call what happened a revolt. I think the worst thing that could have happened is that we launched a product and nobody noticed. I think what we’re from hearing users and power users is good feedback. On balance, they understand that Digg needs to have a scalable platform, it needs diversity of content, and people want a personalized view of news.

It’s a human tendency to react to something that’s new and that’s fine. What’s happening right now is par for the course except for the stability aspect. A lot of sites launch features every week, and with Digg we hadn’t launched in a while. This will become an incremental revolution.

GigaOM: What’s the distribution on Digg between readers, power users, and new users? How does your product team think about designing for such different experiences?

Desai: With any community site, whether it’s Wikipedia, Digg or Facebook, I think the typical distribution is you have a lot many more readers than writers. On a high level that’s clearly the case with Digg as well. But one interesting thing with V4 is the number of daily registered users has exploded. We’re seeing very high engagement in terms of people logging into the site, so that’s good. We think that bond of knowing who’re you’re following and who’s following you will get people to be more active.

In terms of who we’re designing this for, we want this to be a platform for users with a variety of interests, politics, sports, technology, lifestyle. Readers of all ages, of all nationalities. More than half of our traffic comes from outside the United States. Imagine if we can localize this product; we clearly have latent demand. The vision is to provide a news platform that serves a variety of needs as daily habit. The percentage of repeat users in the last week for V4 is quite high, much higher than we were seeing in V3. I don’t want to take anything for granted, but I think the early findings are quite clear.

GigaOM: Some changes you’ve made aren’t bug fixes or stability issues, but rather, bringing back features from V3 that you’d decided to take out. How do you make those decisions about relenting to user demands for old features (even though there may be more nostalgia around them than actual use — for instance, Kevin Rose said the Upcoming page had only 0.4% of views)?

Desai: In both the cases so far, Upcoming and giving users the choice to make top news default, these were things we wanted to add — but not on Day 1. What we wanted to do was get user reaction and react to it, rather than allowing feature creep to delay the launch of the platform.

GigaOM: Your bio on your Digg profile says “my job is to let the inmates run the asylum here and get out of their way.” What do you mean by that?

Desai: I think the philosophy behind that is when you’re at a job as a manager especially at entrepreneurial companies you need to be a coach rather than a micromanager. I want to hire the best and most brilliant people, then let them do what the came here to do: think of innovative ideas for millions of users, take some risks, launch, get feedback and react.

GigaOM: So the “inmates” are your coworkers, not the users?

Desai: Yes!

See also: New Digg CEO Must Grab the Reins and Go

Updated: You know things are bad when AOL’s search business looks better than yours. That’s the position in which Yahoo finds itself. The company said in a securities filing yesterday that it has lost a lucrative search-advertising deal with South Korea’s largest search engine, which some analysts say could carve as much as 10 percent off Yahoo’s gross revenue. Meanwhile, AOL today signed a deal with Google to extend its existing search partnership for five years, and the new arrangement will also expand the services — and potentially the revenue — that it gets from the search giant.

In addition to search and keyword-related advertising, the new AOL-Google deal includes a mobile partnership for the first time, and AOL has agreed to distribute its video content through YouTube, as Ryan noted in a post at NewTeeVee. There was some speculation that AOL might look elsewhere for a search partner after its arrangement with Google expired, which it was scheduled to do in December. AOL originally signed the deal with Google in 2002, after the search company agreed to invest $1 billion in the former Time Warner entity in return for a 5-percent stake. The extension involves no further investment by Google (which wrote off most of the previous investment).

The fact that AOL’s chief executive, Tim Armstrong, helped negotiate the previous deal while he was at Google (he’s the former head of U.S. sales at the company) probably helped cement the new partnership. Armstrong told PaidContent in an interview that the new deal should make the portal’s search traffic more lucrative — something the company desperately needs, since the volume of that traffic is declining as the service continues to lose subscribers, and AOL’s overall revenue declines along with it.

Yahoo — which recently signed a partnership deal with Microsoft to use its Bing search as the default for Yahoo’s properties — may be doing better than AOL when it comes to overall revenues, but its search-advertising business will take a hit with the loss of the contract with South Korea’s NHN, which has 65 percent of the search market in that country. According to UBS Securities analyst Brian Pitz, the loss of the South Korean search-ad deal could cut Yahoo’s gross revenue by about 8 percent, while another securities analyst estimated gross revenues could be chopped by as much as 10 percent (Update: A Yahoo representative emailed to point out that the deal with NHN represented “less than 1 percent of Yahoo!’s gross profit in the first half of 2010″).

The Yahoo-Microsoft partnership took another hit earlier this year when Yahoo Japan — which is partially owned by the U.S. web portal — dropped Microsoft and signed a search deal with Google. While it may not be strictly apples and oranges to compare Yahoo’s loss of the South Korean arrangement with AOL’s partnership with Google, one thing seems fairly obvious: at least in the short term, search revenue at Yahoo looks to be going down, while AOL’s search business looks to be getting better — or at least to be slowing its gradual decline.

Related GigaOM Pro Content (sub req’d): Why Google Should Fear the Social Web

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Graham Hills

Apple’s iOS platform has paid out more than a billion dollars to third-party developers through the iTunes App Store, but Google’s Android Market has yet to experience the same kind of success. Developers of Android apps aren’t throwing in the towel just yet, however; in a recent Bloomberg article, programmers said they have “high hopes” for the future. Why not, given how Android phones are outselling those running either the iOS or BlackBerry platforms in the U.S.?

The sentiment of waiting for Android’s popularity to spawn profits is summed up nicely by Andrew Stein, the director of mobile business development for PopCap, maker of Peggle, Bejeweled and other popular games. He expects revenues from Android apps to catch up to those of the iPhone by the end of next year, as the company will launch titles for iOS and Android simultaneously by the middle of 2011.

“Even though we are not making any money on Android right now, we have pretty high hopes for it,”  Stein told Bloomberg, adding “There’s really no reason why users shouldn’t consume and buy content to the same extent on an Android phone as they are on an iPhone.”

More phones aren’t yet equating to more sales, however. David Zhao, CEO of Zecter, said that 30 percent more iPhone customers of his ZumoDrive product upgrade to a paid version compared to Android users. Perhaps Google has fostered too much of a free mentality with products, which is now carrying over to the Android Market? After years of unpaid services like Gmail, Google Voice and Google Talk, consumers may be conditioned to — and expect — unpaid services or software on a Google-powered phone.

The Bloomberg piece reiterates several of the challenges faced by developers and consumers in Google’s own Android Market that we’ve mentioned earlier. The Market isn’t available in every country where Android phones are sold, which quickly limits the potential user base and sales revenue for a developer. Android tablet devices traditionally don’t have Market access either. Apps can be difficult to find — ironically, since Google is a leader when it comes to searching for information — although in the latest version of Android, the Market experience has slightly improved.

The Android Market experience will be getting better, however. In May, Vic Gundotra showed off upcoming features such as a web-based Market and the ability to send app installations to a handset from the browser. The question is: How much patience do developers have left for Android when mobile apps for iOS are paying larger dividends?

Related GigaOM Pro Content:

• Needed: A Neiman Marcus for Mobile Apps
• Will Killer Apps Affect Which Handsets Consumers Buy?

Well, those rumors proved to be baseless. Apple decided to go with its iTunes membership as a way to jump-start its music social network. Yesterday, Steve Jobs told Kara Swisher there were issues between the two companies.

And Facebook is nowhere on Ping too. Currently, there is no linking, sharing or participation of any kind with Facebook–or Twitter or MySpace either–on Ping, which will work only on the iTunes software on computers, iPhones and iPods. When I asked Jobs about that, he said Apple had indeed held talks with Facebook about a variety of unspecified partnerships related to Ping, but the discussions had gone nowhere. The reason, according to Jobs: Facebook wanted “onerous terms that we could not agree to.”

Jobs did not elaborate on those troublesome terms and also would not say if Ping would incorporate Facebook Connect–which would make it much easier to find friends to share music with.“We could, I guess,” he shrugged. (AllThingsD).

I’m assuming this is about a bigger deal between the two companies and not just the problems many (including me) have observed with Ping and Facebook Connect. Last night before going to sleep, I downloaded iTunes 10 and set up my Ping account (more on that later.) As part of the set-up, I signed up with Facebook Connect so I could find my social graph, ready to recommend songs.

I wonder what happened last night — metaphorically speaking — of course! I woke up this morning, and expected to see Ping activity in my Facebook account, and well let’s just say, nothing is going on. The funny thing is, my Ping is still connected to Facebook Connect, though none of my actions are being sent to Facebook. There are no updates, no mention of artists I am following and absolutely nothing on the app’s wall. I see that I have 26 Facebook friends who are on Ping, but on Ping I find only one of those 26. The emptiness of the Ping’s application on Facebook is sort of like the stuff you leave behind when you break-up with someone and move out of their life.

I’m hoping that the Facebook Connect problems are temporary and a glitch. Otherwise, Ping would really suck and the big losers in this game of corporate one-upmanship are the consumers, who probably — like me–  just want recommendations from our friends, then buy those tunes. As a long-time customer of Apple and its iTunes store, I’m severely disappointed that I can’t bring my pre-configured social graph to Ping. I hope Apple and Facebook both come to an agreement and kiss and make-up.

The dashboard tracks what the site calls “seed views” — representing readers who looked at the content on BuzzFeed’s site or on one of its partners’ websites — and “viral views,” which are readers who came from somewhere else, after finding the item on Twitter, Facebook, Digg or some other content-sharing network. While a recent story about the best anti-Glenn-Beck signs at a rally got about 16,000 views on BuzzFeed directly, it got almost five times that many “viral views” from other sources. The dashboard shows the story got over 19,000 pageviews via Huffington Post, more than 18,000 via Reddit, and over 10,000 from Facebook. It was shared 900 times on Facebook and drew more than 1,000 “likes” from readers there, as well as 2,800 clicks.

Peretti said in an email interview that BuzzFeed has been using the viral dashboard to build not just its own site and track the spread of its content, but to put together viral advertising campaigns for clients such as Viacom, GE, and Intel as part of the company’s marketing consulting business. “We decided that it was time to make a big move and make the viral dashboard public, so everyone can see the internal stats we use to grow the company,” the BuzzFeed founder said. The site will be making the dashboard available free of charge to anyone who wants to use it later this month, Peretti said, and sites can also apply for early beta access to the tool.

BuzzFeed’s new offering could find a receptive audience; more and more web publishers are looking to real-time analytical tools to track how their content is performing on a minute-by-minute basis, rather than (or in addition to) using existing tools that look at traffic statistics over a longer time period. Chartbeat, which provides a broader package of overall web traffic analytics for websites, recently raised a funding round of $3 million from Index Ventures and a group of other VCs. BuzzFeed itself raised an $8-million Series B round of financing earlier this year from RRE Ventures, along with Ron Conway’s SV Angel and Chris Dixon’s Founder Collective.

Here’s a presentation that Peretti did on how to make your content go viral by using what he calls the “Bored at Work” network.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d): With Caffeine, Google Reveals the Challenges of Real-Time

The implementation of the new voice feature is well done and takes advantage of Android’s ability to use home screen widgets. From a hands-free perspective, Vlingo requires a minimum of button presses, although in the future, I’d love to see the app simply stop listening once it detects silence for a second or two, much as Android’s native voice-to-text features work. All in all, the use of voice for even short bursts of texts often trumps pecking on a software keyboard, so the new Vlingo version will appeal to many. As mobile broadband latency decreases with next-generation networks, voice apps like Vlingo are sure to get faster.

Although the voice-integration with Foursquare is only for Android devices at present, Vlingo says that versions for Symbian S60, BlackBerry and iOS are coming soon. Vlingo is based in Cambridge, Mass. and has raised $26.5 million in funding since 2006 from Charles River Ventures, Sigma Partners and Yahoo!

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):

Is Speech-Recognition Technology Finally Ready for Prime Time?

In an interview at Twitter headquarters Wednesday, Leland Rechis, Twitter’s mobile product manager, said the iPad app indicates the direction all Twitter-designed apps will be heading. “It’s not about timelines; it’s about consuming information and encouraging exploration.” The iPad app, he added, “is a great place for us to show how important the content is in the tweets.”

Rechis created the app with Loren Brichter, who joined Twitter when it controversially purchased his iPhone Twitter app, Tweetie (which is now Twitter for iPhone, and is actually the same app as the one released tonight, but with different features expressed in the iPad environment).

Twitter for iPad makes use of the device’s touch interface and big-screen real estate by letting users see multiple cascading panels of information. So, for instance, you might click on a person’s twitter handle, open a panel of information about them, then click on one of their tweets, and open another panel that shows the full text of a linked article from the tweet. If users are new or not signed in, the first panel is a list of recommended users they can scroll through. There are also nice multitouch features, like pinching to see a user’s profile and swiping to see the rest of a thread of a conversation.

At launch, web pages are the only content format fully supported, but Rechis said to expect support for other inline media, such as videos. He said Twitter’s mobile group is highly focused on the goal of connecting the Twitter experience to the real world in whatever ways it can. That could be something like location, but it could also be connected to helping a phone or iPad user who’s fiddling with the device on her sofa while watching television.

Twitter for iPad is free; it’s available in all regions; and it should be live tonight. At this point (like other Twitter apps), it doesn’t contain Twitter’s version of advertising (Promoted Tweets).

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):

The App Developer’s Guide to Choosing a Mobile Platform

No, I’m not blown away by the 160 million number. What I’m impressed by is the thinking behind Ping.

Ping may function like a cross between Facebook and Twitter for iTunes by allowing you to follow celebrities, create social cliques and get artist updates via an activity stream. I think it could have tremendous impact on social sharing and commerce.

From a content perspective, there are three different types of media we love to talk about:

• movies we see
• music we listen to
• books we are reading

These are accepted social norms. In fact, many relationships are made on the basis of collective love of a movie and many friendships have started with mixed tapes. It makes perfect sense for a music service to be social. I’m not alone: The popularity YouTube, the fast-growing MOG and the sadly defunct iLike and Imeem show that people gravitate towards music as a common, collective experience. Thievery Corporation turned me on to The Broadway Project and Chris Joss, which I ended up buying on the iTunes store or via Amazon’s MP3 store.

This click-and-go-somewhere-to-download model of affiliate links can never match a unified experience. Amazon, for example, encourages bloggers and others to link to things they like and then get a piece of the action. This separates social from commerce and treats them as two discrete activities. On the post-Facebook Internet, I don’t think anyone can afford to keep these two actions distinct.

Ping, from what little I saw during Steve Jobs’ demo, allows a similar level of social interaction. It can tell me who my friends think are cool and the top 10 favorites of people in my social graph. Some of my friends are famous deejays. Others just have eclectic musical tastes. They can collectively sift through over 10 million songs and help with the discovery of music. This social-powered discovery is part of the biggest theme of our times: serendipity. About two years ago, when I wrote about serendipity, I said:

The problem is that there’s too much data coming online too quickly, and the traditional method of search that involves first finding and then consuming the information is not going to work for much longer. There just won’t be enough time for us to do that and still have a life. It’s a problem, and therefore solving it is an opportunity — a very big opportunity.

My belief has only been affirmed by growth in the amount of data available. With 12 million songs and 250,000 apps, the best way for Apple to enhance the iTunes store – aka its shopping experience — is through the use of social. Back in 2007, I argued that social networking was merely a feature that had to be embedded into applications to enhance their value. Apple has done a great job of that, but it’s also gone one step further, not only by adding a social networking layer to iTunes, but by meshing it with its commerce engine, the iTunes Store. And it’s made this experience available on both the desktop and its devices.

Apple received much of this social capability with the acquisition of Lala, an online music service, which as a standalone company used sharing of social objects to drive folks towards paid music downloads. Now Apple is only closing the loop by further sharing what users bought. I wouldn’t be least bit surprised if sales of music on the iTunes store rocket upwards, thanks to social discovery.

Amazon, which recently started experimenting with Facebook Connect, has similar ideas, but its implementation leaves a lot to be desired. On Amazon, I’m reduced to reading reviews from absolute strangers for music. I have a handful of friends who have impeccable taste in non-fiction business books, are all members of Amazon, and they already use email to share new book suggestions with me.

What if they too could share their likes and dislikes via a social layer inside Amazon.com? Or what if I could follow my favorite authors and get updates on their books? Much like Apple, Amazon owns book-based social service, Shelfari, and should find ways to embed the social layer inside of all Amazon products and connect its tens of millions of users.

Like Apple, Amazon too has a lot more data about its customers and their behaviors and could create a compelling discovery experience. I believe with tens of thousands of products in its store, the retail giant needs to figure out ways to surface content and other offerings smartly.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d): Why Google Should Fear the Social Web