The Infinite Dial

I think that Ping is going to be stillborn. It's redundant functionality on one hand--posting a status update--and it's missing the key feature of posting from where people actually consume their music, which is NOT iTunes.

Until Apple integrates Ping into their iPod and iPhone music players, it's nothing more than another piece of bloat in iTunes. People, for the most part, don't listen to music through iTunes. They purchase and organize their library there. They listen on their iPods. ITunes just isn't a consumption hub, it's an organizational hub.

And, even if Apple does integrate Ping into the iPod player (not the iTunes app) with an upcoming iOS update, are consumers going to be happy about having to post stuff to Twitter, Facebook, and Ping?

I don't know, maybe Apple will be smart and integrate Ping into the Twitter API, but as it is now, they're trying to create a walled garden, like AOL circa 1997, around music discovery and social sharing.

I give this six months and then it goes the way of Google Wave.

Love you, Jim - but I gotta disagree with you on multiple levels here. First, "posting status updates" is not what Ping is going to be used for. Playlist sharing and music discovery between friends without even opening a browser is what it's going to be used for. Think "Genius mixes" by people you know instead of machine-generated. Ping is hardwired into iTunes just as Genius mixes are, and will be just as seamless.

Apple is big on walled gardens, but Apple's "walled garden" is considerably larger than Twitter's open ecosystem - in fact, Facebook and Twitter combined are dwarfed by the iTunes ecosystem. And, if you watched the keynote and saw the demo, you'll note that you won't even need a Facebook or Twitter account to realize all of the benefits Ping will offer. iTunes is the default tethered music player for at least 160 million consumers, and I don't believe that your statement about people for the most part not listening to their music there is supportable, either.

Finally, Apple has a long history of both iterative designs and of migrating iTunes features to portable devices - Genius started on the desktop, then moved to the iPod within a few short months. We're a point release or two away from Ping being hardwired into every iPod and iPhone in the world. Then what?

Tom,

Love that we can have this debate online.

I think the biggest misconception you have is that people actually use iTunes for more than buying tracks and organizing their playlists. iTunes may have 160 milliion users, but those users see iTunes as something they have to log into so that they can 1) sync photos, documents, and songs to their iDevice and 2) buy crap or 3) rip CDs.

Sure, people use iTunes to stream tunes when they're at their desktop, but nowhere near 160 million people use it as an actual "player." Many who do resent it, as this delicious tweet from yesterday illustrates:

"Ping, the iTunes social network. like I want to spend more time in iTunes. it's like having a social network in prison."

I'm trying to think of an apt comparison. Maybe if Netflix allowed you to share your comments on the movies you rent while browsing their recommendations and film info ecosystem. Would that be cool and work well and scale? Yes. Would that lead to a tremendous amount of socialized discussion on movies? No. Because people go to Netflix to rent movies. It's a storefront, like iTunes. When someone wants to find out information and discover movies, they go to IMDB, which is a CONTENT site. If I rent 3 movies a week, I got to Netflix perhaps 3 times a week.

Can you have a content discovery site with social sharing AND a storefront? Sure you can, but it is so incredibly difficult. Amazon is kind of like that with their reviews and user tagging and social recommendations. But I daresay if you said to someone, where do you go to socialize about books, people would talk about Goodreads more and more. Amazon is seen as a service, even with its user system.

Even if Apple segues Ping to it iPod player, I still think that this is going to be, at best, a modest success. The reason is simple: Everyone is pointing to the wrong competitor for Ping here. It's not Rhapsody or MySpace Music or anything like that--it's Youtube. Youtube really is the default music discovery tool for the young today. They like:

1) full songs that they can check out for free on demand and with no effort
2) easily being able to share those songs where the users interact with their friends (Twitter and Facebook)
3) Accessing that sharing platform pretty much anywhere with no limitations of tethering or being locked to a single system
4) Includes the info they want, not the label promotional crap they sneer at.(such as lyrics--ever notice how many Youtube videos of artists are music & lyrics?)

So, I don't see anyway that Ping displaces Youtube. Ping is closer to AOL, while Youtube is closer to... well, it's Youtube.

Super point about YouTube, Jim - it is indeed an enormous source for music discovery amongst younger demos [PLUG]attend our American Youth 2010 Research Presentation at the NAB Radio Show to find out just how big[/SHAMLESS]. I don't think Ping has to compete with YouTube, though. I don't think either one of us has any definitive information on just how much music consumption is through tethered iTunes listening, and how much is through portable iPod listening, but lets set that aside for the moment. If it is in fact true that iTunes itself is sadly neglected as a source of discovery (and thus social commerce and opportunistic buying), then would something like Ping be a logical response to fix that? In other words, past performance is not necessarily indicative of future returns. But beyond that, you said it yourself in your second sentence - people use iTunes for buying tracks and organizing their playlists. If Ping is just a "music Twitter," then there won't be much use for it. But if it does, in fact, help users organize their playlists, then it could be a hit.

In any case, the current iteration doesn't appear to be a showstopper, that's for sure. But I still can't go along with you that it's stillborn. I suspect they'll keep trying :)

Hope you guys don't mind me jumping in here; a couple of thoughts.

Ping is already on the iPhone and iPod touch. It's a tab on the iTunes Store app, not the iPad app, which is telling.

At first I was shocked that there is no LastFM like 'charts' feature, but it makes perfect sense. Ping is a thinly veiled iTunes sales tool and nothing else. The fact that it only reports on iTunes media, music, and reviews is completely lame. I could be wrong, but I think the kids will sense that. A social media network based around music alone is hardly a sure thing. LastFm is superior to Ping in every way, yet it has not exactly set the world on fire.

Excluding charts doesn't make sense from a content generation standpoint either. I don't buy much at all through iTunes, and I don't typically write reviews, so my profile is virtually blank, even though I listen to music through iTunes all day long, every day. That seems kind of dumb. A charts feature could at very least immediately populate your profile and prevent a ghost town effect.

I signed up, looked around, saw my friends ghost towns, and will probably never look at it again. I predict others will have a similar experience. This is a recipe for the still birth that Mr Kerr predicts.

Ping will either have to change radically or die, mainly because it doesn't follow Swimm's Law.

Swimm's Law
A social network where the primary focus isn't seeing how many people from high school are now fat/divorced, will eventually fail, or be engulfed by a social network that follows Swimm's Law.

I got kind of excited about Ping during the keynote. I would love to be able to see LastFM style charts from my friends, who are much more likely to use something built into iTunes. But it seems to me that Ping is WAY too closed to ever flourish as its own destination.

It will be interesting to see what happens.

Mike, doesn't the ability to see all the Kajagoogoo and Scritti Politti in my library sorta like seeing how fat your friends have gotten? There is still Swimm's Law potential here!

Clearly, this iteration of Ping isn't gonna do it. But Last.FM was for music "sharers." Ping in all of its closed glory could be for music buyers - the folks in the middle of the bell curve. Could be. We'll see.