Apple Dreams Big: Still Confident Ping Will Catch On
So Apple is dancing around, boasting of one million users having joined Ping in under 48 hours. That’s a pretty funky dance, Apple.
“One-third of the people who have downloaded iTunes 10 have joined Ping,“ says Eddy Cue, vice president of Internet Services. “As many more people download iTunes 10 in the coming weeks, we expect the Ping community to continue growing.”
Alright, Ed. Granted, that sounds impressive. But consider the following: Spider-Man 3 is one of the top-grossing movies of all time. It is also universally hailed as one of the worst movies of all time.
The perceived popularity of a service is by no means telling of its appeal. For instance, I’m one of those one million users. Of course I signed up to Ping, I wanted to see what it was all about. It was about selling Lady Gaga albums. So I logged back out, and will never touch it again. If I could pull myself out of Apple’s metrics, I would. Hey, Ping, notify me when you’re a sixteenth as useful as Last.fm, would ya? Thanks, you’re the most.
What I’m most interested in is what the long-term user base of Ping will be. For the next few weeks, it would be unfair to hazard a guess, as most people will still be jumping on the bandwagon out of morbid curiosity more than anything.
Just like Spider-Man 3.
How about you guys? Anyone here tried Ping yet? Anyone here tried Ping yet, and enjoyed it? Share your thoughts. Or, like… else.
iTunes Store > Account > Ping > Turn off.
That’s what I did after 5 minutes. I beleive Ping will fail. They’ll try to improve it with some amazingly awesome useless features, but still.
People won’t leave Facebook / Last.fm
It doesn’t really do anything all that useful yet. It launched with seemingly too few artists, too few “find people like me” functions, and feels very much like shilling for sales. I also think that these are all realities of a first launch.
On the surface, Ping aims to be a specific-purpose social network: increase music sales by creating community. Apple has the size that even a modest early participation will bring huge numbers, but it will need a plan to keep people involved. Unlike Twitter which has thousands of one-time users, people will go back to iTunes again and again. Unlike Facebook, the strict music nature of the thing could make “friending” less risky…but in both cases its narrowness robs it of opportunities to identify with others…Twitter is multi-dimensional, Facebook typically has strong connections between friends.
It should be fun to watch.
PIng is just more bloat to iTunes. I also turned it off right after checking it out. Its a pretty sad product coming from Apple. I hope it does fail, then maybe they will stop tying everything to iTunes using its leverage to promote its products. Maybe we will finally get a media player that is focused on playing our music.