The Real Ping?
Music fiends and tech geeks among you no doubt followed Apple’s product announcement yesterday; I watched it on my phone. [Hey look, a major media company unafraid to provide high quality live video on a mobile platform!] Of the new offerings the one that immediately got my attention was Ping, an iTunes-based social music service. I am a longtime Last.fm user and have been frustrated that iTunes has never natively supported the ability to feed data to that service or others like Twitter. So now I’m trying out Ping:
After spending some time today with Apple’s new service I must admit I’m a bit disappointed. Ping has no browser version and apparently no open API or other feed mechanism, meaning profiles are essentially locked inside of iTunes. And I am completely shocked that in the set-up process I was never prompted to import my play history – I simply assumed that track plays would be a central element of the Ping profile. Other weak points as of now include the paltry selection of artists whose iTunes pages allow following and a paucity of options for finding other users.
Apple seems to envision Ping primarily as a platform for iTunes Store purchases. No doubt the record labels it works with appreciate that approach, but if the company continues to emphasize buying over sharing Ping may end up a marginal presence in social music.
