Hosted within iTunes, and runs on iPhone as well as the desktop.
Apple has launched its own social network, focused on music and hosted within its iTunes Store.
It's called Ping, and was unveiled tonight at the company's Autumn event in San Francisco.
Ping is part of the iTunes 10 desktop application, which was released tonight. However, it will also be accessible from the iTunes app on iPhone and iPod touch.
CEO Steve Jobs described Ping as "sort of like Facebook and Twitter meet iTunes. It's not Facebook, it's not Twitter, it's something else we've come up with".
Users sign up to follow their friends - via Facebook Connect or by typing in their name - as well as bands and singers, who can have their own Ping profiles.
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They can mark songs and albums as 'liked', or make comments on them. All of this appears in a Facebook-style news feed within the Ping service.
Meanwhile, there will be personalised charts for each user based on the music that their friends and favourite artists have been buying.
Ping is live tonight as part of iTunes 10. It's part of Apple's wider strategy to add social features to its content offering. It also revealed that Game Center, its social community for iOS games, will go live next week.
For more on tonight's event, see our liveblog.
