It’s the end of the year, and every blog out there has its own 10 Top Failures to write about. Making almost every list out there is iTunes Ping - Apple’s widely-slated Music Social network. It’s easy to knock Ping (I’ll admit I’ve made a few in-person potshots about ‘the irony of the world’s most anti-social company wanting to build a social network’) and no-doubt publications are revelling in the page-view linkbait associated with placing an Apple product or two in a Top 10 Failures List. Linkbait aside, Ping certainly has its issues - and in the scheme of recent Apple product launches it’s certainly not changed the earth. So why do so many people have a problem with Ping?
Every social network that’s launched has always first focused on the ability to build a social graph, and then over time rolled out how to make money off the venture (using social graph and personal information to target ads, for instance).
Ping has no qualms in having a single (brutally apparent) goal: to sell more music via iTunes. It’s not hidden behind a service that scrobbles whatever your friends are currently listening, offering the convenient choice to buy any recently played song via the (startup-funding) iTunes affiliate link. Ping is built upon broadcasting what you purchase, to sell more music to your friends.
If anything, people’s loathing of Ping stems as much from the overt commercialism (hey, who knew Apple would be wanting to turn a profit on this thing?!) as it does from some of the functional break-down in the service.
For an Apple product, Ping lacks any of the nice touches the company is renowned for. Look through your timeline (ignoring the fact that you can scroll through an entire fortnight’s activity on the homepage): it’s full of almost-broken English.
Before showing you how Ping handles things such as Likes and Comments - let’s look at Flickr, who not only add a possessive but use just an apostrophe when the username ends with an ‘s’ (very well played, Flickr):
steve commented on nikf’s photo
steve commented on stepahlicious’ photo
And Facebook (which uses full names):
Nik Fletcher commented on his album “Christmas 2010”
Nik Fletcher is now friends with Stephanie King
Now take a look at how Ping handles these notifications:
Nik liked Steve like of “We Belong Together” by Randy Newman
Nik commented on Nik purchase of “The Beatles”
Steve started following Xavier
It’s painfully stilted, and entirely devoid of personality. If a user comments on their own purchase, it should be “Nik commented on his purchase of The Beatles”, and when interacting with another person’s activity there’s a couple of things missing. First up, the possessive. Secondly it needs to answer “who is Steve”. Sure, there’s a tooltip that shows “Go to the Profile page for Steve Jobs” but compared to other social networks that make it super-easy to see whose activity is being Liked or Commented on, Ping makes it incredibly painful. The last of those three may seem perfectly fine - however this notification is for when someone you follow starts following someone else who you don’t. I have no clue who Xavier is - a surname and profile would help clear things up no-end.
This is an easy one: it’s stilted by the slow loading of the iTunes Store, without any way to easily browse activity. It’s not a new browser tab to check what your friends are buying: it’s opening the iTunes window (or expanding it from the mini-player), choosing Ping and waiting. There’s no easy URLs for user profiles - e.g. ping.apple.com/nikf - it’s just an iTunes link with a user-ID (here’s my profile URL, for example). There’s no Ping equivalent to “I’m @nikf on Twitter”.
Sure, iTunes now lets users share songs to Ping with Likes and Posts, but there’s no scrobbling. A purchase of a song isn’t the strongest indicator of a user’s liking of a song: the playing of a song is. Ping with Scrobbling would offer me far more of an incentive to visit - I care much more about what my friends are listening to as opposed to what they’re buying (and even when buying, there’s no guarantee the purchase will be via iTunes and thus tracked).
Before we entirely write off Ping, remember Apple iterates - famously - and for all the criticism, I’m fairly certain that Ping has achieved its goal: sell more music. With Ping receiving a tonne of negative press, I can’t imagine Apple ignoring the feedback. A quick review of the terse language, scrobbling support perhaps, and the breakout from iTunes would all offer Ping some redemption in 2011. And that’s before you even consider the possibility of the much-requested Ping for Apps.
Posted on Friday December 31st, 2010
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