David Emery Online

Ping!

2 September 2010

It’s been a long running cliché that Apple have never really ‘got’ the web, and never really ‘got’ social networking either – it’s been something they’ve been happy to ignore, letting their products do the talking without friending, liking and status updating.

Until now:

Introducing iTunes 10 with Ping

Ping takes (read: rips off and/or steals) its features from the holy trinity of incumbent social network sites, Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. The whole thing feels quite Facebook-like, and indeed it does strike me that had the two companies worked together on something that would have been far more interesting (with Facebook getting a decent music offering via iTunes, and Apple getting a decent social network) but alas instead we just get artist pages which are similar to Facebook pages, and activity streams that are obviously very familiar (and hence quite Twitter like as well).

It’s MySpace (and to a lesser extent, Last.fm) that’s more of a target though, as they’re increasingly repositioning themselves as a music-focused site (now that everyone does their social networking on Facebook and Twitter). Ping could well be the final nail (of many nails) in their coffin.

That’s not to say that Ping’s particularly good, however. It has a certain level of success built into it by being part of the most popular online music store in the world, but it is fundamentally lacking a point (or USP in marketing-ese). It doesn’t answer any problems, and the only real thing it brings to the table is an ability to share releases on iTunes easily with your friends and followers.

This brings up a few other issues as well: firstly, and most boringly, you’ve got to make your social graph all over again and get connected with all your friends. I find it odd that they haven’t added an import from twitter/facebook/gmail functionality – seems like a no brainer and makes getting going with the service pretty difficult.

The other big issue is that as an artist, how to you get on Ping? I’ve done a bit of looking around on the service and the Apple site and can’t find any information about setting up an artist profile which leads me to believe that it’s something wrapped up in the music iTunes Connect process (or at least part of the existing ‘getting music on iTunes’ process). This all but rules out Ping as a place for new, unknown artists to set up a presence as it looks like you can’t get on without releasing music on iTunes. Obvious, yes, but still a massive hurdle even though it’s not that hard to do (via an aggregator) as it takes it from an ad-hoc thing which as an artist you can use for communication to something a lot more concrete.

You’re not going to have an artist promoting their early demos on iTunes Ping, which means they’re always going to start life online somewhere else.

It’s also very limited in what you as a user can do; you can’t post status updates, you can’t post photos or videos and you can’t post links – all you can do is ‘like’ releases and tracks or you can ‘post’ them which is essentially the same but allows you to add a message as well. It hardly lets you do anything, and in fact I think they’re going to have to do a lot of improving in this regard to keep people’s interest which is hardly Apple’s traditional forte – they don’t really do rapid iterations on their software, preferring larger yearly updates, which doesn’t really mesh with the way all the other social networks develop (and they do so by necessity, reacting to their users).

With Ping, Apple have started down a path that’s totally new for them – it remains to be seen whether it’s something they can pull off with the same level of success they’ve managed with their other music endeavours.

You can follow me on Ping here.