11:52 am - Sat, Sep 4, 2010

4 notes

Thy Ping-dom Come, Steve Jobs Will Be Done

Like many, I am baffled and underwhelmed by the Ping service in iTunes 10.  One thing is certain to me. Ping is not a music social network, nor a social music network, nor even a social network that happens to have music. 

Let’s take a quick inventory of all of the assets available to the iTunes Ping service:

1. Complete playlist, listening, reading, rating and app usage history across desktop, iPhone, iPad and iPod
2. Seamless audio scrobbling of aforementioned history
3. “Genius” technology for identifying similar tracks in your inventory and aggregating them
4. The largest multimedia digital retailer in iTunes Store
5. The LaLa.com codebase, team and vision
6. Credit Card information
7. Purchase history
8. Email
9. Gender
10. Location (both residence and geolocation)

Given all of these rich resources, the best Apple can come up with for Ping is a service with:

• A unidirectional broadcast follow-only metaphor - users cannot see who is following them.
• Artists We Recommend You Follow - note, I am not following the consumption or conversation around the artist’s music, but rather, the artist’s account activity in terms of who they followed and liked.  The existing iTunes Store page for Artists has more music and recommendations than the Artists’ Ping Profile.  See worthless activity like below:

• People We Recommend You Follow - I followed Rick Rubin, but again, I don’t get access to see his song library (which would be afreakingmazing) and make purchases based upon it.  I only get to see who he followed and what he liked.  
• Artists and people are effectively the same, just different titles.  Yes, everyone in Soundgarden likes Pearl Jam.  Really?  Useless.
• Recent Activity - classic activity stream, but note that point of purchase is the focus here, not the conversation or sharing of the liked song (you have to go to the bottom of the pull-down menu under “Buy” to even see Twitter/Facebook connectivity).  The commenting is atrocious and minimizes the community aspect by forcing you through multiple clicks on the same content to even see the entire post of a thread entombed in a scrolling frame.  Yes I want “More” community, and less overt shilling.  See image of bungled community below:

• I will spare you yet-another-list of what Ping’s recommended Artists and People were for me.  Suffice it to say, trash like this usually resides in a Hefty Bag.

With more explicit and implicit behavioral digital media consumption data than any other service on the planet, there is absolutely no “cold-start” problem for Ping.  This is why Apple’s launch of Ping is both unbelievable and unforgivable.  This is like the Dream Team losing the Olympics.  Seriously.

All that said, Steve, I’m available to help if you need me.  :-)