Apple's Ping Social Network Officially Closes

[milo]

Like cover flow and any other viewing options that I'll never use other than the basic list, is this a "feature" that can be turned off and ignored?

Yes, the keynote also showed it in the traditional list view. I just hope they didn't lose any of the other current functionality.

It's not easy to know which things will fly and which will bomb, so I'm not going to poke fun at Apple here.

When Ping first arrived, pretty much everyone declared it a bomb, and they were right.

Ping wasn't replacing an existing functionality.

But that has nothing to do with who was the head of Apple at the time and what they might have done. There are plenty of examples of botching existing functionality on the last guy's watch - iMovie, FCX, releasing a shuffle with no buttons, etc.

 

[batchtaster]

I won't grieve for Ping, and yet it seems to me that Apple could have made it immensely popular if they'd simply done one little thing: turn off iTunes review/comments.

iTunes comments are already a very popular way of posting inane rubbish online. So use that. Make people use Ping in order to review songs, albums, artists, apps, videos, TV shows, etc, in good old integrated Apple style (sometimes known as "lock-in"). They've got the tech, the store, the content, the blabbermouths desperate to shoot their yaps off at anything and everything... all the ingredients are there.

You review something, it goes up on your Ping wall, and the old review/comment field on any given song/album/artist/etc is replaced by a feed gathering posts from people's walls. Add some stuff to help you see when someone often rates similar (or the same) stuff as you in a similar manner, bingo-bango, social network.

Oh well. Seeya Ping. Not really sure what you were good for...

 

[KnightWRX]

I won't grieve for Ping, and yet it seems to me that Apple could have made it immensely popular if they'd simply done one little thing: turn off iTunes review/comments.

The fact that they already aggressively forced ping into the UI and didn't give good enough options to disable it already left a sour taste in people's mouth. Imagine if they had really also forced it for reviews/comments.

That wouldn't have helped. Ping was just not needed and not interesting.

 

[Avatar74]

To be fair, those are also linked to often as well. So... it wasn't like I wasn't fair here now was it ?

Agreed. Just saying it could have gone either way depending on how they managed it from the get go. But given some of the things Facebook was looking for in terms of branding, I don't know that I would have made the necessary concessions either. There's a tradeoff to Apple's brand... e.g. they could have hooked up with Verizon a lot sooner if they'd agreed to co-brand the phone but that would cannibalize Apple's brand.

It's sort of like the question of signing with a record label. Is it better to collect 70 percent on 1000 albums sold independently or 14 percent on 35,000 albums sold with the aid of a record label's promotion/marketing? Mathematically, on the surface, the immediate result is the same. However, the latter example has a more accretive halo effect because there's a certain threshold that will get you on more people's radar in more markets. You're far more likely to hit a ceiling in the first example than the second because of other factors like barriers to entry and economies of scale.

Brand tradeoffs are the same kind of thing... Apple wants to be in control because they have a certain risk exposure when they co-brand with others whose reputations are not entirely something they can control but can negatively affect them nonetheless.

 

[finalcut]

useless thing! now release iTunes 11!!!