Ping is mingin’

There was a lot of buzz and excitement after Apple unveiled their latest gadgets at the Special Event on September 1st, which unveiled a totally new line of iPods (excluding the iPod Classic), information about iOS, and Ping, Apple’s take on how music social network should act.

Ping is Apple’s first try of making a social network. To start using Ping, you must open and use it in Apple’s new (but not improved) iTunes 10. It emulates the Twitter follow/follower model with a few differences, namely you can decide if people can follow you or not. Your Ping profile is linked to your iTunes account, and you login using those credentials. This was obviously going to happen, as it gave the immediate access to over 160 million iTunes Store customers. Using Ping you can follow musicians, follow your friends, and you can like albums and songs. This all seems very good in theory, that is until you start using the platform.

When I first fired up iTunes 10, literally minutes after it finally was available to download, I logged into Ping straight away to test it. I then noticed a Facebook button, which was to add Friends that were on both platforms, so you can easily have all your Facebook friends, as friends on Ping. However the Facebook integration didnt work, and by the next morning it was gone. We have all become accustomed to  bad launches in the past month, notably Digg, but at least Digg is working on finding solutions. To add friends now on Ping, you must know their name, or their email address, making it incredibly difficult to find people. But again, that’s not half as bad as actually using it.

Another major gripe I have when using Ping is the fact that its requires using iTunes. While iTunes isnt as much of a resource hog as it once was, its still an extra application that needs to be run, and its still an extremely frustrating application to use. Sure, some might say that using a Twitter client is no different, but at least they work with the browser (at least Echofon does). As you know in iTunes there is no address bar and the back and forward buttons are cleverly hidden. You can copy links in iTunes, but its no match for a functional social network that work in the browser of your choice. The thing is though, Ping (and the iTunes store) is all browser based anyway, so it would not be too diffcult to enable browser-based access. This is another example of Apple’s control over us all. Whats next? The Apple store can only be accessed on iPads with 64gb storage and 3g??

Apple’s main reason for launcing Ping was obviously to drive sales in their own music store. Apple being Apple, they made a very conscious decision to force people to go back and forth through the iTunes Store and Ping. To like an album, you must be on the iTunes Store page of that album as is the case with songs. In a perfect world, that would not be the case, but Apple like money, and this is a fast way of making it.

Itunes 9 brought links to sharing on Twitter and Facebook, with hopes of integration with these social network to be better in iTunes 10. You can count on Apple to rule out any improvements in that area though, so sharing in iTunes is still as lame as ever.

In conclusion, Ping is a music social network for you and your friends – without the friends, a music social network to rate, like and share music – without the sharing, and a browser-based music social network, without the network..  or the browser. Something’s not right there, and I’m not the only one who thinks so …