Steve Jobs is famous for "One more thing"—the final announcement at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference in which he lays out the most awesome thing he has to announce.

Yesterday's "One more thing" was iTunes Match, a service that scans a user's library of songs and compares them to Apple's vast iTunes music library. If the service finds a match, the user can treat that song as part of iTunes in the Cloud, meaning it's stored by Apple and can be easily downloaded onto any device. This costs $24.99 a year, and it's what Apple seems to have done with Lala, the music startup it acquired back in December 2009.

Lala allowed users to stream music from the Web to a browser, anytime, anywhere. Users could listen to any song once, or pay 10 cents for the right to stream a song. Another way to get music into Lala's system was to download Lala's Music Mover tool, which scanned your existing music library and matched what it found against its own records. If the Music Mover found you already owned a song, it credited you in Lala's Web system, and you now had the right to play that song. Music Mover was most likely the foundation of iTunes Match.

It's going to be a valuable tool for Apple, and a powerful draw for iTunes in the Cloud. Uploading songs to a cloud drive is a pain, and the manual upload required for Amazon's Cloud Drive, for example, was seen as a major obstacle to adoption. Users will undoubtedly like being able to get all their music into Apple's digital storage unit in minutes rather than hours.

Seeing iTunes Match, however, makes me think that Apple is unlikely to use Lala's streaming technology. With Match, Apple's already getting a valuable and potentially lucrative piece of technology out of its acquisition of the startup. It's possible that Lala's team also helped create Ping, the so-so social network that's now part of iTunes, which is a hobbled version of some of the social features that Lala had.

Given the trend toward limitations on data plans and Steve Jobs' famous concerns about quality (which may, for example, have inspired Apple to make users download movie rentals from iTunes instead of streaming them), Apple may decide that Lala's streaming technology is more trouble than it's worth--at least for now.

The specifications of iTunes in the Cloud will shape the battle for the future of how media content is delivered. Amazon and Google have both envisioned music services that include streaming as a significant component.

When Apple bought streaming music service Lala, speculation was that the company intended to work on a Web interface for iTunes. Lala's engineers would certainly have had the expertise, and the company had an interesting approach to the concept of owning songs--users could buy "web albums" which gave them unlimited streaming rights but no downloads or physical copies.

Now there's more reason to suspect that the company intends to make a Web interface for iTunes. Cupertino is hiring a user interface engineer for a position that could be tailored to the project. The job description says the engineer will be "responsible for implementing interactive, rich media projects within the iTunes group" and proceeds to list familiarity with a number of Web technologies as qualifications.

I hope we will see a Web interface for iTunes. I loved Lala's vision of how users would want to consume music, and it's time for Apple to move forward from the mp3 player model. Users today are connected to the Internet more than ever, and we need music services that take full advantage of this.

I've been worrying about the fate of Lala ever since it was acquired by Apple last week. The speculation I've read seems split between thinking that Apple intends to embrace the company's long-term vision, creating a powerful Web-based version of iTunes, and suggestions that Apple only bought the service to poke Googlein the eye.

I first discovered Lala months ago, thanks to a deal it struck with Google, which put the service at the top of music-related search results.

When you create an account and log in, you can listen to any song in full once for free. If you want to listen to it again, you can either buy a physical CD, which also grants you permission to stream the song online, download the mp3, or pay 10 cents to buy a "web song". The web song lets you the stream the song as much as you want, from anywhere.

Web songs are exactly how I want to listen to music. I don't listen while I'm walking or commuting, but I do listen while I'm at a computer, and I want a synced service that gives me access to my songs no matter where I am. I'm happy to pay for this, and 10 cents per song is a great example of micropayments at their best--each song feels cheap, and I find I want to buy a lot of them.

Since music formats do change, what I'd really like to do is buy the rights to a song for life and have a company store it for me. But it's been hard to trust even established companies to make music available over an extended period of time. For example, when Microsoft's MSN Music store died last year the company's plans to stop running the licensing servers that authorized users to play the DRM-protected songs proved highly controversial.

For now, I'm left holding my breath over the fate of this excellent music service.