

Apple’s Ping to End With a Thud in Next Release of iTunes  - danso
http://allthingsd.com/20120612/apples-ping-to-end-with-a-thud-in-next-release-of-itunes/

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jpxxx
I work primarily with Hardcore Apple Partisans. When they'd ask what Ping was,
I'd say "It's this thing where you can buy a song and then talk about it with
your friends."

Their eyes would be fluttering away by the end of the sentence. Nobody, not a
one ever, cared at all. There are a thousand other venues to discuss music
with friends, most of them involving alcohol.

I personally feel Ping could have been amazing were it a rewards shop that
rewarded you with extras for buying tracks.

You buy a top single - a free remix of that song is offered on the side.
Nothing obligatory, just extra.

You buy an album - Ping provides that album's music videos and a writeup from
the band.

You buy a pop song from a hot entertainer - you're entered into a raffle for
show tickets.

You buy a karaoke standard - Ping asks for your best Photo Booth karaoke
version that gets uploaded, shared, and voted on next to that standard.

If it was value-adding what you were buying, I think that would be
interesting. But hearing your Address Book chime in on a trashy single you
bought? No thank you.

~~~
Alex3917
It would be cool if it worked like a prediction market as well, so that if you
were one of the first people to buy a song that later became very popular you
could actually make money.

~~~
CrazedGeek
A bit like Amie Street? <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amie_Street>

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51Cards
"At this point, years into the social networking phenomenon, why not leave the
social stuff to the social people who are good at it?"

While I acknowledge that Ping was a huge failure the above statement strikes
me as odd. If that's so obvious then...

Why not leave Maps to people who are good at it? Why not leave voice
recognition to people who are good at it? Why not leave... etc. Apple hasn't
been shy about diving into competitor's markets... which I don't always agree
with fully. But on the flip side, you don't know if you don't try I guess.

~~~
chj
That explains why iOS is not a good platform. The owner of this platform loses
his focus (building a good platform, giving developers more power), instead it
starts to duplicate developers' effort in the name of user experience. Surely
they have a chance of doing it better, but it is just because they can use
their private APIs.

~~~
ryannielsen
Are you very familiar with iOS development? I ask because those people I know
who are were very happy with the improvements and APIs added in past iOS
releases and seem to be delighted with what's being released with iOS 6.

Perhaps you've found yourself hampered by the lack of certain APIs that Apple
has yet to add or yet to promote from SPI. I know some devs in that boat. But
I don't think you can accuse Apple of having lost focus on the iOS platform,
or that they aren't feverishly working to give devs more power.

~~~
chj
A very important missing feature is external keyboard event support. I don't
want to go too far into the details, just let me tell you this: ESC, Function
Keys,CTRL, ALT are all dead.

I submitted a feature request among other developers like the month iPad came
out. So far, no any sign of adding it. Yet we continue to see Apple adding
this message that reminder.

~~~
nl
I'm probably not the worlds biggest Apple fan, but:

 _A very important missing feature is external keyboard event support_

Umm.. no it isn't. It's pretty clear iOS is designed for devices _without_ a
physical keyboard, and if that is important to you then you will always be
working on something Apple doesn't think is important. Their priority there is
quite clear and I don't think it is reasonable to blame them for that.

(Written by someone who likes a physical keyboard and is very happy with my
Asus Transformer)

~~~
chj
Even if it is not universally important, it is very good for projects like:

[http://www.pcworld.com/article/229284/the_250_case_that_turn...](http://www.pcworld.com/article/229284/the_250_case_that_turns_your_ipad_into_a_laptop_almost.html)

As a platform provider, why bother work on an app that thousands of developers
can do better, and not work on a missing feature that can enable further
innovation? We are not talking about a Siri level of feature, we are talking
of a trivial platform feature that basically a decent engineer in Apple should
be able to do it in a week, testing included.

~~~
nl
_As a platform provider, why bother work on an app that thousands of
developers can do better, and not work on a missing feature that can enable
further innovation?_

I'm not sure if you want to hear the answer to that or not.

It's economics & platform strategy. Ping was created to attempt to increase
the stickiness of the iTunes platform, to appease the record labels (who
wanted an alternative to MySpace) and to bring Apple closer to Facebook. All
of those things were major strategic goals for Apple at the time.

Making the iPad something more like a laptop when the MacBook Air already
exists? The only way your "bug" will get traction within Apple is if someone
decides that is a goal of the iOS platform. That might happen, but pulling an
Apple engineer for a whole week off other projects to work on it seems
unlikely to happen without fairly major executive sponsorship.

~~~
chj
There are tons of cases where iPad could be better off with a keyboard,
especially for productivity apps. Come on, android has full keyboard support
from day one.

~~~
untog
And what percentage of users actually use the full keyboard support? I mean,
with Android tablets we're asking "what is a low percent of a tiny number of
people", but still. Being able to use an external keyboard with your
phone/tablet is a very, very niche activity.

~~~
51Cards
Tons... look at the ASUS Transformer and Slider. Devices like that can't exist
in iOS properly.

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ethank
Ping was a concession to the labels who asked for an alternative to MySpace
with a revenue model. It was never given much attention by Apple internally,
nor was it a source of "pride" for anyone really.

I remember when it was first introduced, a good number of us at labels were
thinking, "great, another marketing platform to update for a bit, then have go
stale."

Plus it was supposed to have Facebook integration, which was pulled quickly
after launch.

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Groxx
> _“We tried Ping, and I think the customer voted and said ‘This isn’t
> something that I want to put a lot of energy into,’” Cook said._

Good. That is _exactly_ the kind of decision they should be making. Thank you,
Cook, for rather quickly killing something that deserved to die.

~~~
smackfu
Quickly here meaning about 2 years.

~~~
Groxx
In the media world, that's warp 10.

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makecheck
I think Ping was too specific.

When we've already built up 99% of the infrastructure required to share
_anything we want_ (e.g. messages, photos, videos, links, entire pages on
Facebook), it's very hard to see the point of a service that specializes in
sharing exactly one thing.

The timing was also horrible. Some of the technologies currently available for
sharing are 5 or 10 years old or more, so what the heck was supposed to be
revolutionary about Ping? It needed to arrive before there was Facebook or
Twitter.

~~~
bodyfour
I actually thought the timing could have been good. When it was announced,
MySpace was clearly in death-spiral mode but still a lot of bands were using
it as their primary online presence. I thought Ping had at least a shot at
being the place they moved to.

Obviously it didn't work out that way. My hunch is that Apple's feelings on
the project were "lets throw this out there and see if it sticks". It clearly
didn't, and now they'll move on. When you're making $1500 in profit a second
you can experiment a little.

~~~
r00fus
> My hunch is that Apple's feelings on the project were "lets throw this out
> there and see if it sticks"

Which is somewhat uncharacteristic of Apple and what some folks blame Google
for doing repeatedly. I hope Ping's failure resulted in a lot of lessons
learned about the social space.

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david_shaw
It's actually really interesting that this product took so long to get axed.

Even Google+ had an initial surge of users that loved it (and some still do),
but I've _never_ met anyone that was a Ping lover (or, as far as I know, even
a willing Ping user).

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mikek
Ping is one of the few Steve Jobs-approved product failures. Even MobileMe
eventually morphed into iCloud. Ping was DOA.

~~~
steve8918
Actually, Steve Jobs' track record is closer to 50-50 in terms of successes vs
failures. The difference is that his failures were usually not very
significant, and his successes were monstrous.

~~~
sneak
Are you counting the totally unprofitable development of NeXTStep as a success
or failure (considering that NeXT would very likely have died had Apple not
bought them)?

(Those same APIs and objective paradigms became the basis for the entire iOS
app ecosystem, via MacOS...)

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michaelhoffman
And nothing of value was lost.

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kittxkat
I _always_ wondered why Apple never aquired Last.fm, it's such a simple
service and would've perfectly fitted within iTunes.

~~~
bnr
Last.fm was sold to CBS in 2007. It also has lots of legacy client apps on
many different platforms to support - I doubt that's something Apple would
want to do.

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smackfu
I remember one of the big selling points was basically artist blogs, like Lady
Gaga. Were those ever updated?

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leothekim
These things happen. Next.

