Apple iTunes Ping: Hands On

Amid all the at Apple's annual music event, the consumer electronics powerhouse had a major software announcement: the new iTunes 10, with its social networking module, Ping.

Clearly, Apple saw the meteoric rise of Facebook and Twitter—and the decline of the former musician's darling MySpace—and saw a tremendous opportunity to build a social network into their fantastically successful iTunes store. After all, every other social network in the world has developed its audience and then worried about the revenue model. Apple is in the unique position of being able to go about it the other way around. But it begs the question - is a basically closed music store the right place to build a social network?

Apple watchers probably won't remember that a service very similar to Ping appeared out of the Northwest nearly three years ago—. And though that service includes something still missing from iTunes—an all-you-can-eat music subscription—the sheer number of iTunes and iPod users means that Ping is likely to quickly eclipse Zune Social, unless can pump new life into it. But let's leave that precursor and check out how Apple's new entry handles music social networking.

Start Pinging
You get to Ping by choosing iTunes Store from iTunes' left navigation panel, and then clicking the last choice on the top right, appropriately labeled, "Ping." It's not a particularly front-and-center placement for a feature that made such a splash. After clicking through, you get a big Ping welcome splash page, with the single button choice: "Turn On Ping." Easy enough, so far. At this point, you sign in with your Apple ID or AOL screen name. For some reason, the service didn't let me use my AOL account, though, warning that my perfectly within bounds password choices weren't acceptable. I resorted to my existing Apple ID.

Next you create a Ping profile. You're asked about your gender, location, and favorite musical genres. You can also include a photo and description or yourself. You can resize and frame your image, but, even though I was using an iPhone photo, this feature choked, spun its timer wheel for a long time, and didn't place my photo in the end. Another photo, another try, and I got my mug up there, but for a long time my Profile page showed a placeholder with the text "Your photo is currently being processed." I assume that this will speed up once the crush to register dies down.

Ping Privacy
After that, you start choosing what to show: You can have your Ping feed automatically display all music you like, rate, review, or buy; manually pick what to display; or not display your music choices at all. I suppose if you choose the last, you'll be sort of a lurker, seeing what other people like but not showing your own tastes. I saw two rows of five album art thumbnails from my collection, but the second, manual choice let me kill the ones I didn't want to show.

Anyone who follows social networking is waiting for the next bit: the privacy settings page. Some observers considered Steve Jobs' comment about how easy privacy was to control a subtle dig at Facebook, which offers pages of byzantine privacy options. Indeed, Ping's privacy page is dead simple: You get two choices—Allow people to follow me, and Don't allow people to follow me. The first has a sub-choice of "Require my approval to follow me," which approximates the typical Facebook "walled garden" setup. The default, however, is the more Twitter-like approach of allowing everyone to follow you. We prefer opt-in rather than opt-out for social networking in general, but maybe it's less objectionable in a music taste networking site than in an anything-goes sort of site like Facebook.

Start Following
After choosing the first, open option, my first actual Ping page opened, with a search bar for finding artists and people, followed by two sections of recommended artists and people I should follow. Below this was my Recent Activity area—empty at the moment due to my newbie status. Up on the right top corner, the only real interface controls were: My Profile, My Reviews, People, and Featured. Though there's an "Invite Your Friends By E-mail" button, it would be nice if, like every other social service, you could find friends via your Webmail or other social-networking contacts.

I was surprised that less than 12 hours after the launch of iTunes 10, some people already had major followings: One user I followed already had over 15,000. After you start following people, a new interface element appears—Ping Charts. This shows the most-purchased songs by people you follow. Of course, music celebrities had even more followers; the omnipresent Lady Gaga already has over 65,000. But I couldn't find any of my favorite electronica musicians—Jon Hopkins, Ulrich Schnauss, Air, Banco De Gaia, Orbital, or even the pretty well-known Moby and adult contemporary hit Keane. All got results in Zune, but then it's had three years' head start. Odds are that Ping will catch up.

The actual activity stream consists of your new friend connections, purchases, comments, and concert plans. Every time a song or album is mentioned, a Buy button is displayed, and this offers additional dropdown choices for Like, Post, Gift This Album, Add to Wish List, Tell a Friend, Copy Link, and Share on Facebook or Twitter. This is the one place where I saw Ping's acknowledgement that there's a world outside of iTunes. Unfortunately, you can't preview the song directly from Ping, as you can on Zune Social.

The My Reviews choice takes you out of Ping to your existing iTunes reviews. No one I followed had written any reviews—for each I got a little error message saying "There are no reviews available." For concerts, you get two choices—"I'm going" and "Find tickets." The ticket section is powered by Live Nation, which was acquired by Ticketmaster, so clicking "Find Tickets" takes you to Ticketmaster.com.

In some well-known performers' updates, I saw comments that were clearly spam—win a free iPhone type stuff. Fortunately, there's an X that lets you kill this kind of comment or even report it. I could only delete comments from my own feed, but I could report spam even if I saw it on a performer's feed. Poor Yo-Yo Ma had lots of these spam comments, for some reason.

Ping on iPhone
Apple would have lost a huge potential market if Ping were only available inside the computer version of iTunes. The version on mobile devices like the iPhone and iPod touch is well-adapted to the smaller screen. Three buttons at the top take you to Activity, People, and My Profile views. You can Like and Comment on posts. The People page looks sort of like e-mail or SMS, with arrows at the right to navigate into the person's feed. I couldn't actually edit my Profile picture and details from the phone, though.

Apple iPad tablet users will have to wait till November for version 4.2 of iOS to be updated with Ping in their version of iTunes.

No Ping For Facebook, Web
Not only is Ping similar to Facebook in concept, but its appearance bears an uncanny resemblance to that of the social network du jour: It even sports a similar dark blue theme. One odd thing about the service, noted by Kara Swisher in Boomtown, is that there's no Facebook connector for Ping. After all, if you want a social network, it would make sense to tap into the world's largest user base of social networkers. But according to Swisher, Steve Jobs considered the terms Facebook wanted "onerous." He did concede that a Facebook Connect option for finding friends may appear some time. For now, however, Ping lives entirely within the closed Apple land.

Not only is there no actual Facebook or Twitter integration, but there isn't any Web presence for Ping. Pretty much every other social network on the planet has a Web site, including dozens that are music-oriented - except Apple. Even Zune Social lets you interact via a Web browser.

Will Ping Pop?
Ping is a typical Apple product—slick, intuitive, and closed. It's hard to say at this point whether it will really become the Facebook of musicians and their fans. It's certainly yet another tool for discovering and keeping up with music and musicians that strike your fancy—that is, if Pandora, Facebook, and iTunes itself aren't already enough. At this point, Ping is like a fairly small community with a few big stars thrown in. But if the service remains unavailable on the Web, that will limit its audience—somewhat. But, let's face it, if all the world's iTunes users start using the service, Ping could be number one with a bullet.

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