Apple’s new Ping network
Apple released a pile of new iPods last week, the second version of the Apple TV and a new social network called Ping. As far as a social network it’s pretty basic and that’s where it’s getting the ire of tech pundits. What is Ping? Looking at [Apple’s Ping page](http://www.apple.com/itunes/ping/) you can see that it has three main goals keeping with Apple’s style of making some simple to begin with. First, connect with artists and see their updates. It’s basically twitter, but goes a little further by allowing artists to post song recommendations in a Ping format. Two, follow your friends and see what music they are listening to and what they recommend. Three, it allows to keep up date date with the above two points (not sure why this is a another point), listen to previews of songs people you follow recommend, buy them with a single click and top song lists. It also allows you to see concerts in your area and help buying tickets. It’s a pretty simple service with a specific goal. The tech pundits are complaining it’s basically not like every other service. Bisness Insider’s Jay Yarrow complains that it doesn’t interact with your iTunes collection. You can only like songs that are in the iTunes store. This does make a lot of sense. It’s powered by iTunes and pushing iTunes songs, so if I like a song or suggest an album that isn’t on iTunes it really doesn’t help people since they still can’t buy it without searching other sites. Criticizing an Apple service for being based around other Apple services seems like a silly complaint. If that’s what you want, there are other blogs you can read. His second complaint is that you can’t listen to music through Ping, like another service Lala which streamed music to devices. With iTunes as your hub and ability to sync to an unlimited number of iPods, I don’t see the point of needing a streaming service.
Schonfeld from Tech Crunch complains that he can’t read people Ping’s in Twitter, Facebook or anywhere else. I actually consider this a plus. If I want to follow someone’s tweets, I’ll follow them on twitter. If I want to follow them on Ping, I’ll see their posts there. Having to read them across three services, two of which don’t provide the integration that give Ping value is pointless. He goes on to say the only time he really uses iTunes (besides syncing) is to buy music, which is exactly where Ping is aimed. You can also access it on the iPod touch and iPhone so it is rather mobile, but you can’t access it from non-apple devices like Android. If there is a problem with Ping it’s that it’s difficult to find your friends. It looks like Apple was planning on using Facebook connect, but it sounds like talk between the companies broke down. Most articles quote the load it would put on Facebook’s servers, but a single request for someone’s friends seems like a minor compared to what they have to process everyday. It will be interesting to see if Apple manages to get a foothold in this space with this version of Ping, but I’m guessing we’ll be seeing a big update in 6 months or a year.