With the two product launches by Apple and Microsoft this week, we got one of those nice snapshots of the online music and portable media players. It also left me with the thought that we have the online music market of established technology companies adding elements associated with social media - algorithmic and social recommendations - in an effort to grow their businesses, while the media-focused social networking sites have crowds, but reliable revenue remains elusive.

The two most distinct elements of the announcements were the two different takes on implementing search/discovery/recommendation capabilities into paid music services. Apple's new Genius feature, built into the new iTunes software and into the new iPod firmware, generates recommendations based on the user's library, as well as inputs from the store's editorial content, the iMix lists and the like. Genius will be particularly useful for users with large libraries, but for Apple, it could be even more useful as a transaction driver. The Zune's approach, which builds on the incorporation of an FM radio tuner, allows users to purchase songs directly from a broadcast or tag them for download later. This is accomplished by stations broadcasting metadata along with the song that can be read by the Zune's FM receiver.

So, we have two different ecosystems and two different approaches to search/discovery. iTunes is well established and evolving in a fairly logical manner based on the need to continually show consumers the value of keeping their accounts on iTunes and buying or using their iPods. For iTunes/iPod/iPhone users, the device/software/service integration is the key. In this one, the evolutionary rhythm is relatively steady. Rapid, orthogonal transitions aren't required; in fact, they're probably not even desirable. So the addition of the Genius recommendation system that ties a user's library to inputs from the iTunes Store cloud - most popular downloads, user reviews, iTunes' editorial information and song metadata - is a logical extension.

With Zune, this is a new ecosystem, relatively speaking, with a similar construction - devices, online service, desktop software - but one that started with a slightly different differentiator: social sharing among Zune users. Zune customers who opt for the subscription service can share songs and playlists; they can tag songs and track their plays on their Zune profiles, etc. The challenge for the Zune team is getting enough people into the social swing of things, so to speak.

What I took away from the first half of the week was that Zune's latest updates are starting to show that Microsoft is beginning to offer a more fully realized competitor to Apple's juggernaut. What will be interesting to watch is how effective the different approaches to recommendation and discovery will be in helping Apple maintain its lead or in giving Microsoft a boost.

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I don't know who I feel more comfortable scanning my play lists. The nice thing is that it will include artists who are unsigned. Yet I don't know how smart software can be to scan all the playlists of the world and make musical sense out of them. Pandora does it with real people and I haven't yet found any of my unsigned friends on there but I have tried. There are many though on the project. Still, how is Apple's software going to make sense out of my playlist which largely consists of songs I have written? Plus, I don't know if I want them to have access to my playlist, so I'll forgoe the pleasure of genius, right? After all that is what Pandora is there for. I think that it would be the right time for Apple to explain how it works, and how it gets smarter. I think Apple should really explain more how the technology gets smarter with more playlist information. There has to be some human element involved in the mapping of all this. My concern is that it is more of a ploy to develop a deeper profile of its users, or perhaps as you say embark on a social network type environment. I am just not so sure what to make of genius right now, having not used it and not sure if I want to.