Ping: Why Bother?

Ping would have been a great thing for Apple to have done about 3-4 years ago, but at this point, the Social Networking thing has pretty much played itself out, picked its winners, and we’ve all moved on. Apple went to all the trouble to make a deal with a golf company, and all we got was a third rate social network? First of all, in what is probably just a temporary setback, Ping is choked with spam, but more importantly, it’s just a sucky social network.I can’t really sum it up better than a blogger named Swizec, who pretty much rips Ping apart in a post today. Even Ping’s ace in the hole, that is has access to all the information about music listening habits from every iTunes users, seems to have been botched. Instead of broadcasting to the world what music you, you know, actually like best and listen to, it only tells people what you bought or rated at the iTunes store.

Of course, being a new social network, Ping is suffering from ghost town syndrome. One of my OSAlert colleagues posted on Facebook that he couldn’t find anyone to follow on Ping. (Keep waiting, dude!) Swizec notices that while he can “follow” Lady Gaga, who he doesn’t like, none of the bands he actually does like are on Ping yet. And they never will be, because in two weeks everyone will have forgotten that Ping ever existed. It will be like that Quicktime desktop app or Safari for Windows that Apple installed on your computer when you activated your iPod: something you vaguely remember as having hitched a ride with iTunes.

I’m actually a big Apple fan, but I consider myself pretty immune to the RDF. If anything, my fondness for Apple makes me feel bad about Ping and all the talented people who wasted their time building it.

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