Lord of the Ping(s)

Apple has thrown their hat into the social networking ring with the release of Ping, a networking service firmly based in music. When I first heard about it, I was intrigued, wondering how the service would work and if it was going to knock other sites like MySpace and Facebook off their well deserved lofty perches. I also wondered why Apple had chosen such a hideous sounding name for their product, but imagined that ‘Ping’ scraped in just ahead of ‘iPing’ and ‘MySpacev2.0’ (what makes me really amused is that some high powered marketing twat got payed ~$20,000 to come up with monosyllabic drivel. ‘Ting! Zing! Bing! Xing!’ There you go Apple; I just named your next four products. That’ll be 80k thanks) However, after exploring Ping, I don’t think Apple is seriously threatening the industry leaders of social networking – yet. 

My primary issue with Ping is that it feels like a big marketing tool. From a PC you can only access Ping through iTunes 10 and so Apple have integrated Ping with their online music store. Consequently it seems that almost all the status updates from the ‘big bands’ (e.g. I’m following Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Lady Gaga, Muse, Nirvana) are simply tools to sell more records. Bob Dylan, for example - and I get the feeling if you asked him Bob would never have heard of Ping - has included all his own songs in the ‘Music I like’ pane (a spot usually reserved for artists to show which other musicians they admire), positively screaming ‘this page was made by a record company exec!’.

Subtle, Bob

 I will keep a close eye on this, but I also have a theory that a lot of artists will have links to other acts on the same record label as them, regardless if they actually ‘like’ the music. Obviously as musicians record sales are one of their primary concerns, but after people have gotten used to the intimacy of Twitter a status update on Ping that’s obviously from a PR intern is not exciting. Twitter is exciting because for a lot of personalities, their tweets have less to do with selling records and more to do with the artist’s everyday life, giving a personal connection to followers that our invasive cyber society craves. In this way Ping is more like an extension of the ‘Store’ page on a bands website rather than a social tool. 

Ping is only a few days old, and at this stage it seems rather heavily populated by the international acts that I mentioned before. Ping has the potential to become significantly better when it is utilised by smaller, local acts, in much the same way that MySpace is used now. Again, there are several barriers that I can see which would prevent smaller acts choosing Ping over MySpace. The primary one is that more people have access to the internet than they do to iTunes Ping. Not everybody uses iTunes, and even less of those people who do use it would actively use Ping. Of course the logical conclusion is for bands to set up both MySpace and Ping profiles, but I bet I know which one most bands will create first. Since Facebook took over the mantle from MySpace as the primary social networking site, MySpace has focused on the music side of social networking, and it does this admirably. It is too early to judge whether Ping will seriously challenge this, but it would have to do a few things differently before it can be considered a serious contender.

Nirvana and The Boss

 What needs to change? For a start, I’d love to see Ping move off the iTunes pane and into an actual website accessible from a normal browser. I’ve never been particularly enamoured with the iTunes store interface, and to have a whole social networking site within this theme gets very annoying. The fact that you have to download and install iTunes 10 to get access to Ping is a turn off as well, I could have started ten Twitter accounts by the time I was ready to launch Ping. Couple with the way Apple mysteriously ‘gathers information’ before starting Ping, I had the eerie feeling I wasn’t social networking but being interrogated by the virtual Gestapo. 

The actual artist pages are very bland, and it seems in the first release there is very little room for this to change. To give an example, Lady Gaga’s page looks very similar to Bruce Springsteen’s: all pages have the same drab, greyish background. I can’t understand in the era of Web 2.0 why Apple would be limiting online creativity to some sort of Orwellian conformance. Of course, one man’s drabness is another’s functionality, so what I see as boring others will see as refreshingly simple. 

Ping's "Simple" User Interface

 Ping will also increase significantly in ‘funness’ when more ordinary people join up. As far as I can tell, none of my friends are using Ping (no sniggering over my lack of friends, please. They’re just not as sophisticated as me, that’s all). Apple were planning to have some sort of built in connectivity with Facebook to facilitate bringing over large quantities of people to the new site, but Facebook pulled out at the last minute. Now I am left with sending the standard ‘You should join me on Ping’ emails provided by the site, but I don’t hold much hope for these (when was the last thing you did something that someone suggested you do via a generic email?). Ping also lacks fun-ness simply because there isn’t much to do. Sure you can look at band pictures, or get a status update from them, but there is nothing that Ping adds to social networking that wasn’t provided before by either MySpace or Twitter, apart from the ability to purchase songs directly from your Ping feed.

Therefore, at this stage, I’m inclined to think of Ping not as a social networking revolution but as the next stage in online shopping evolution. Artists can post songs via their Ping page and followers can buy those songs from Apple in one click. Ping can be seen as extension of the iTunes store, giving artists a chance to talk back to their fans and be their own salespeople instead of relying on Apple to flog their wares for them. 

Unfortunately, Ping lacks the intimacy of Twitter, the functionality and popularity of Facebook and the industry standard-ness of MySpace. In two months I will endeavour to write again about Ping, because it is slightly unfair to judge a social networking site a third of a month after it was launched. In two months time I could be saying what a fool I am, that Ping has changed the way we interact forever, but at this stage unless some massive improvements are made I think Ping will remain a fledgling product.

Check out
www.apple.com/itunes/ping