On Wednesday this week Steve Jobs and Apple announced a number of new products and concepts at an Apple event in California. Among them was the launch of Apple’s first foray into social media, called iTunes Ping.
I was listening to the event on my iPhone and following the commentary online via Twitter. There were lots of interesting instant-reaction Tweets by industry types. I found this one, by Kara Swisher, columnist for AllThingsD.com, to be quite interesting:
Apple Ping is “vertical Twitter” says Fortune’s Adam Lashinsky, sitting next to me at launch event in SF
At the time of reading, I hadn’t used Ping yet. My first thought was, Oh, I’m Not Sure This Is A Good Idea. Apple is an utterly closed company, making its living off of closed platforms. There is no sense of openness, of encouraging sharing, that is required in today’s social media landscape.
However, I wanted to reserved judgement until I had the opportunity to play around with it for myself. I downloaded iTunes 10 and created my Ping profile ( iTunes link). Ping profiles do not work with browsers. Everything must be done within iTunes.
I come to Ping as a five-year user of Last.FM (formerly Audioscrobbler), which can be accessed via browser and is an open social network.
First off, if you have an Apple/iTunes account, then by default you have a Ping account. You’ve just got to activate it and pick a photo for yourself. Once that’s done, you can find “friends” to “follow” (similar to Twitter) and talk about music.
How you do that, though, is the tricky part.
The entire purpose of Ping is to make people spend more time in the iTunes Store. Every action requires that you wade through the iTunes Store. Want to write about an album? Find it on the iTunes store, then click “Share”. Just want to “like” a track (a la Facebook)? Find the song and click the tiny arrow next to the price.
After you “share” an album or song, or “like” something, it appears in your stream as recent activity. It always appears in such a way to make the album or song easy to purchase, should the mood strike.
Sound weird? It should. I believe GigaOm sums it up well:
Ping is essentially an e-commerce platform for music disguised as a social network.
An industry standard for new social platforms is that they all must connect to the other existing social networks in some way. Tweet this, Post to Facebook, etc. You can’t find much of that in Ping.
Facebook is nowhere on Ping, either. Currently, there is no linking, sharing or participation of any kind with Facebook–or Twitter or MySpace–on Ping, which will work only on the iTunes software on computers, iPhones and iPods.
Despite that, people are joining. iTunes has 160 million users worldwide, so odds are in Apple’s favor that they will be able to make some significant gains.
However those gains could be wiped out if Apple is not able to get Ping’s spam problem under control.
Ping really is a “social network inside a walled garden”, as GigaOm’s Paul Sweeting calls it.
Just because you’re a wildly successful tech company does not guarantee success in social media. Just ask Google. They know all about that.
Image credit: Bruno Pedro/Flickr
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