Will Apple’s Ping pong?

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Friday, 03 September 2010 18:31

Your IT - Entertainment

Will there end up being a big stink over Apple’s attempt to create a social music network inside of iTunes, or will Ping bring Apple the social networking buzz Google craves but can’t get?

One of the reasons given online by pundits as to why Apple’s new Ping social music network inside iTunes 10 will sing is that iTunes has 160 million users.

Well, so whoopty-do what? Google’s Gmail has a gazillion users too, yet Google’s Facebook-killer-wannabe, Buzz, has been a real dud.

Instead of giving iTunes 10 a real facelift, such as tabbed browsing, a better and smoother way to browse through all of the content within, a real speed boost and more, Apple has given iTunes a couple of mini-tweaks here and there and shoved in a whole new feature instead.

If Ping doesn’t take off as Apple hopes, the backlash could sting, and badly, but at least one thing’s for certain – the success, or otherwise, of Ping, will have no relevance to the continuing success of Apple’s iDevices.

After all, there was no Apple-delivered social network up until now, and Apple is undeniably the most successful seller of mp3 devices in all history, no matter what Nokia’s claims are to be the biggest seller of mp3 devices.

I guess Apple can put it down to being the biggest seller of mp3 devices that people actually use, but whether people will actually use the Ping music social network is really yet to be seen.

I’m quite biased against social networking because social networking usually means socialising and notworking. 

Sure, there are a stack of social networking ‘experts’ who lalala over how wonderful it is and blah-di-blah and get quoted here and there in the press, but honestly, social networking is usually just a massive bloody big waste of time, a ginormous threat to your privacy, a security risk and a way to get addicted to mindless crap like Farmville.

Or whatever the latest social networking stupidity or banality is.

Look, I wish Apple the best of luck in grabbing people’s attention for its social aural network. If it helps Apple sell more music, so much the merrier – I’m all for capitalism and there's no law against marketing!

But I won’t be wasting my time with it. Reports say the first spams have already started, too, with commenters pointing to links where you can “get a free iPhone!”.

So… time will tell whether the smell of Ping starts going off and emitting a real pong, or whether this Ping thing will make Apple the “kingping” in social music networking too, just as it is in music players, smartphones and digital devices.

Ultimately, it's hard to see at this early stage how popular (or otherwise) Ping will prove, but if there's anyone who should be worried over whether they're "off" with the market, it's musically-minded MySpace, with users potentially finding "their space" is now pining and pinging for them not via a browser, but iTunes instead.