Apple sent out an email earlier this week practically begging anyone with an iTunes account to log into their new social network Ping and use it. Ping was one of the tent pole features of this year’s major revision of iTunes and while my initial reaction to it was lackluster, I tried to give it a fair shake.
Even after making a concerted effort to use it, I gave up. At its core Ping is a flawed service in the 2010 era of social networks.
Integration? What Integration?
By far the biggest sin Ping commits is that it is a walled garden that is only accessible via iTunes or the Music application on your iOS device. Apple and Facebook continue their pissing match, which keeps any sort of information I share with Ping being accessible to my friends on Facebook.
The same goes for Twitter. There’s no seamless way for me to share a song or album I enjoy with my Twitter friends directly in Ping. It’s true that each item in iTunes will pass off a long URL to the Twitter web site, but that entire experience should be integrated into iTunes itself.
Even worse, Ping is entirely relegated to iTunes. There’s no Web access. I hate iTunes. Why would I want to spend anymore time in it than the few moments it takes for me to hit play in Party Shuffle?
The Sidebar Doesn’t Party
Ping got slightly more useful in recent updates to iTunes by adding the Ping sidebar to many areas of iTunes, but for some reason it is missing from the Party Shuffle view. I spent 95% of my time in iTunes in party shuffle because I can just tell it to start playing music and then forget it exists.
Every now and then, however, a song will pop up and I’ll want to share it with my Ping followers. If I’m browsing my music library directly, it’s easy to just click “Like” or “Post” but not so in Party Shuffle.
I’m not sure what technical hurdle is there, but if it were erased I’d be far more inclined to click “Like”
Spammy Artists Are Spammy
My dream music service would let me specify which artists I want to have information about and then give me news about those artists upcoming albums, breakups, drug overdoses, etc. It’d also tell me when the band was within a given proximity of me so that I could purchase tickets if I wanted.
Ping gives artists direct access to their profile, so they have turned to using it just like they use MySpace, Facebook, Twitter and any other social network, to incessantly spam their fans endlessly with meaningless notes about their concert last night, sales in their merchandise store and trying to make their latest music video “go viral.” No thanks.
API
This one pretty much goes against everything Apple does in the Web service space, but if you are launching a new social network or any other online service in 2010, not offering an API is a crime.
If developers had access to a Ping API, things Last.fm integration, desktop widgets and even third-party integration through Facebook would be possible. Right now, Ping is just a black hole of music purchase information.