AOL has just released its PLAY music app and it looks very interesting. It offers free music streaming as well as a way to share what you’re listening to with your friends via Twitter and Facebook. The app comes with its own music player with access to your iTunes library and also enables you to stream SHOUTcast radio, access CD Listening Party (free streaming of complete albums) and MP3 of the day.

Key Features:

• Listen to your music in a beautiful custom music player
• Play music from an extensive collection of free songs and CD’s updated regularly
• Access to over 47,000 SHOUTcast radio stations
• Share your musical experiences with friends and followers
• Find and follow friends using the app through Facebook, Twitter, or Searching
• Add your own album art to your shares
• Share your musical experiences on Facebook and Twitter
• Listen to previews of your friends music posts and buy songs you like on iTunes
• Comment on and like your friends shares, you can tag friends in comments too! Just @username your friends and they’ll get an alert
• Get notifications when a friend follows, likes or leaves you a comment

[Free – iTunes link]

If you use MobileMe, Windows Live, Yahoo!, or AOL for email, then you can have Ping search your contacts for friends who are also using Ping as well as send annoying invites to those friends who are not using ping. Here’s how:

1. Go to Ping in iTunes and in the “Find People” box in the right column, click “email” in “invite friends by email”
2. A box will pop up asking you to list out the email address of those you would like to invite. Ignore this and notice the logos for MobileMe, Windows Live, Yahoo, and AOL at the bottom of the box.
3. Click the appropriate logo.
4. Sign in.
5. The window will divide into two sections: the top will list your contacts who use Ping but whom you don’t follow, complete with avatars, and the bottom will list the names and email of your contacts who do not use ping.
6. Use the checkboxes and deselect/select all links to send follow requests to those you’d like to follow and email invites to those you’d like to invite.

Ping has been off to a rocky start and this may help, but probably not enough. Personally, I only found 8 more friends using this search feature. Ping is also integrated with Twitter, but I don’t see Ping even having a chance to take off until Facebook jumps on board.

What do you think? Does the email search help make Ping more relevant?

[Apple]

I remember well the days of yore when I had a whopping 5 channels to choose from for my viewing pleasure. Now before you start doing some quick math and send me Geritol for my birthday, I was just a wee lad then. Although I didn’t have much in the way of choices, I made sure to never miss an episode of “The Six Million Dollar Man”, re-runs of “Star Trek”, and a generous helping of “Sesame Street” and “Electric Company”. I also had to (gasp!) actually GET UP off the couch, WALK to the t.v., and MANUALLY change the channel! Ahhhh, those were the days.

Times have certainly changed. The average home now has about 114 channels to choose from. I switched to DirectTV recently and I get lost in the maze of menus and virtual cornucopia of channels and programming to choose from. You may be wondering what all of this may have to do with your iPhone. HARK! There is a handy AOL site designed just for the iPhone that can help you navigate the ever-expanding universe of televised entertainment!

Open Safari on your iPhone and tap in this web addy: http://iphone.television.aol.com. Next, enter your zip code (or the zip code of where you happen to be located — this is important). You are then offered a list of providers including Cable (i.e., Comcast), Satellite (Dish or DirectTV), and Broadcast. Select the service you are using. You are then presented with options for viewing listings for “What’s On Now”, “Complete Listings”, “Channel Guide”, or “Search All TV Shows” at the bottom. Searching is particularly useful if you are dying to know when and where the next episode of “Gilligan’s Island” will be airing (will those poor people EVER get off that wretched paradise of an island??).

If the list you have selected is particularly long, like the 800+ listings for DirectTV for instance, you may notice that there is a bar on the far right side of the screen, along the border, which allows you to tap on a range of channels to immediately jump to that location. Brilliant.

If you are on the road or sitting comfortably in your very own La-Z-Boy recliner at home, keep your iPhone handy and let this AOL TV Listings app help you find what you want to watch. Tune in next week right here (adjusting the rabbit ears is not necessary) for another Tip!

Disclaimer: Tip o’ the Week makes no guarantee, express or implied, that any tip found herein will be new or particularly useful to the reader (no, we certainly don’t promise you’ll enjoy the reruns of “Lawrence Welk” or “Love, American Style”).

As part of his piece on the continuing confusion surrounding the $99 iPhone SDK program acceptance/pending/rejection letters, Daring Fireball’s John Gruber also dropped this very interesting nugget about the equally continuing and confusing situation surrounding the apparent Apple ban on multitasking and background apps:

[A] source confirmed to me that the iPhone AIM client AOL demoed during the iPhone Roadmap event does not cheat by continuing to run in the background — it quits when you switch to another app, but doesn’t log you out of AIM automatically. Such a client can’t notify you of IM messages from the background (a la the way the iPhone notifies of you SMS messages), but when you switch back to the AIM app, messages you missed should appear. Be wary of claims that “An app that does X is impossible without background processing.”

If accurate then that, as they say, is that in terms of any hope for multitasking apps before June. If Apple didn’t grant AOL “special dispensation”, they certainly won’t give any to Johnny “Next Big Social Perpetual Ping App”.

But is a non-background running AIM of any use to you? A welcome break from the constant connection demands of IM? A way to keep AIM second class to an eventual Mobile-iChat Touch app? Smart thinking on Apple’s part or just a train wreck in the making?