
Apple's ping is a big pile of steaming dung - Swizec
http://swizec.com/blog/apples-ping-is-a-big-pile-of-steaming-dung/swizec/1444
======
crad
I pretty much had the same experience.

For comparison I found Muse had a stream on Ping so I checked it compared to
their Twitter account. Ping's stream for them was sanitized and small. It was
not personal and I assume it didn't tell me anything other than what the label
wanted me to know.

With full access to my very large library including many albums purchased in
ITMS, they suggested a series of artists I have no interest in.

Activity is only measured by what you purchase or review in the ITMS, not on
what I actually do in iTunes. They have an opportunity to steal everyones
lunch with Ping. Mirroring last.fm functionality with scrobbling and then
presenting that info in the profile is a no-brainer.

When looking at my profile, I noticed that the two things it pointed as were
two reviews I made in iTunes from years ago. Fresh content is king.

The interface is terrible. Navigating around Ping is a mess.

Granted this is a 1.0, but they have a lot of work to do if they want it to
get serious traction and they need to loosen the content reigns a bit. Waiting
for my profile pic to be approved is silly.

~~~
Swizec
I could understand not supporting last.fm integration. Sure, they want to sort
of kill last.fm anyway.

But the fact there is no scrobbling of played music? That's just silly, what
on earth were they thinking? O.o

Honestly, I'd like to know, can ANYONE explain that?

~~~
gyardley
Sure. If I had to guess, I'd say that Apple's stretched extremely thin, their
products are worked on by surprisingly small teams, they were under time
pressure to get this out the door, the culture of secrecy kept them from doing
some user testing, and (given the number of small details Ping got wrong) this
particular project didn't have strong product leadership with experience in
the space.

~~~
chrischen
I did no user testing (just did what I thought was obvious), I only had 3
months, I worked by myself (mostly), and my site, <http://like.fm>, doesn't
suffer from most of his fail points. I think apple just wanted to add a slight
social layer to their store.. You know, to drive sales. I mean if you are one
to buy stuff from the iTunes store, you'll probably sign up and follow
something. Other people who use the service aren't immediately going to be
much value. I mean why else would they make a "social network" embedded in
iTunes. You just can't expect something like that to get enough meaningful
adoption if it's exclusive to a single platform in a heavily segmented market.
So apple wasn't crazy (they just can't be that blind), they just wanted to add
a light social layer to iTunes store to boost sales.

~~~
yrb
I wonder if they didn't want to do a Buzz in terms of making all your private
information suddenly public, and might ease into features such as scrobbling
over time. The amount of spam on there is probably their biggest problem at
the moment. It is hard for me to objectively judge as my market segment isn't
catered for at all in terms of features. It will be interesting to see what
the rest of the population think of it. To me it feels far to much like it has
been designed to drive consumption of 'popular' music and 'me too' buying.

EDIT: The top 10 pop chart artists all seem to have around 100k followers,
will be interesting to see how it goes.

~~~
chrischen
Even if they do ease in scrobbling their "social network" will be crippled by
the fact that your Winamp buddy, or Rdio friend, or Linux pal doesn't use
iTunes. For Ping to succeed they're going to have to convince users that their
platform is dedicated to social music, not enhancing the itunes purchasing
experience. So unless iTunes gets every music listener in the world, or darn
close to everyone, to use iTunes instead of however they currently listen to
music, then their social functionality is going to always be less useful than
a platform independent service. A social network gains value with more users
(in general), so if iTunes is restricting the flow of potential users it's
just going to hurt them.

iTunes could satisfy the iTunes user market. But unless clusters of friends
all use iTunes, a decentralized service will be more useful. And i'm not sure
if being an itunes user means more of your friends use itunes (to any level of
significancy). So chances are most people will have a bunch of friends who
can't participate.

------
RyanMcGreal
Next week on Daring Fireball: _Why Ping is much smarter than you think and
will prove the naysayers wrong_.

~~~
9oliYQjP
Actually, if you're into cool, trendier, up-and-coming, non-mainstream music,
Ping is pretty fantastic. The first recommended follow for me was Alexandra
Patsavas who is the christener of cool when it comes to indie music. Ping got
it spot on. I have no more need for using MySpace. I hate to brand all the
naysayers wrong, but frankly they don't seem to share the same musical tastes
as I do. I'd like to think I have pretty damn good taste, better than the
naysayers :)

The naysayers seem to have wanted a Facebook replacement. I hate FB. Ping is a
nice domain-specific social network. It serves a purpose, like LinkedIn. And I
quite like it.

~~~
chc
How can something be cool and trendy while also being obscure and not
mainstream? Don't "cool" and "trendy" imply prestige and popularity?

~~~
joshuacc
No. Cool and trendy mean that something is on the path to being mainstream.
When it does hit mainstream, it's passé. :-)

------
st3fan
You don't get it. Ping is only there to drive up music sales. This is why
every single page has Buy buttons. And why the focus is mostly on music from
the store and not for example your ripped music is scrobbled.

This is not about music fans. This is a controlled environment to sell more
music.

~~~
alextgordon
Sure, but to sell music you need to sell it _to_ fans. You can't just make a
page with a buy button on it, call it a social network and expect it to
increase revenue.

Either Apple have something up their sleeve or they're being terribly naive.

~~~
jbail
I think if you're Apple, you probably could create a blank page with a Buy
button to increase revenue.

------
Marticus
While trying to avoid the cliche "Apple sux" explanation, I'm actually
genuinely surprised they botched this as badly as they seem to have.

Maybe it's releasing a product without a comprehensive music database being in
place. Maybe it's the inability to link to, you know, their OWN PRODUCT a la
last.fm and, well, anything.

But really, whoever was in charge of this obviously wasn't being watched
closely enough - this is a software foul-up of pretty large proportions.

Plus I like the implication that they don't trust any other form of
avatar/username site (Gravatar, etc) and instead you have to take your picture
with your cute widdle iCameraAsApprovedByApple and then wait for it to be
"approved."

Which makes me feel immensely sorry for anyone whose job encompasses looking
to see if pictures violate a ToS agreement, even if it is 10 minutes a day,
and even if it is "pre-filtered" by some type of algorithm (surely, please for
the love of all things surely).

Overall, depressing.

------
mcantelon
Apple's controlling nature, and desire to be the Disney of the computer world,
seem incompatible with the instincts needed to create a successful social
network.

~~~
shortformblog
You've nailed it. All the things that make Apple's business model advantageous
– the meticulous scripting, the secrecy, the glossed-over experience – work
wonders on hardware. But when it comes to social networks, it's clear that
they just don't understand the model at all. Because they can't do ANY of
these things and have a successful social network.

------
miguelpais
I was still thinking of giving some credit to Ping when I saw, after being
disappointed with all the other features, that you could post a music to your
profile. That's something that I quite regularly do on my Facebook profile,
simply post a youtube video of some music I like so I can share it with my
friends.

I quickly went back to my library, right clicked on a song and searched for
some Post button. Unfortunately, as I was soon able to find out, you can only
do that inside the ITMS. Of course, some of the songs I have on my library are
not in the ITMS, but they could still figure out an automatic way of matching
the artist and track name, ask me if one of the matched songs is the one I'm
talking about and post it.

As a result, Ping, instead of being that brilliant last.fm killer idea we all
envisioned when we heard about it of bringing a music social network to the
actual music player people use, is just a webpage poorly stamped to my music
player, with absolutely no integration with my library.

Even Last.fm, a 3rd party social network has more integration with my library
then a social network _inside_ my music player. If this makes sense...

P.S.: what I said about Posting is equally applicable for Liking a song. You
can't do that in your library and there is also no relation between your
5-star rated songs and the music you actually like according to ping.

------
SeanLuke
> And I have no idea who Yo-Yo Ma and Jack Johnson even are.

oooookay.

~~~
warfangle
Yeah, this guy not knowing who one of the most skilled cellists on the planet
is kinda undermines any of his music-related credibility.

~~~
Swizec
And that's worse than Ping not knowing who The Doors are?

~~~
ptomato
Or more probably the artist pages are created by the artists.

~~~
riffic
or by labels

------
marknutter
I'm dumbfounded that they're using iTunes as the platform for this thing. Not
having it exist as a website is retarded beyond belief. I really hope this
isn't the fruit their Lala acquisition is bearing, because if it is it makes
me even more angry that they killed one of my favorite web apps. They should
have just rebranded lala as Apple Ping and been done with it. Huge fail so
far.

------
garyrichardson
Usually, Apple does a very good job of masking when a product is designed
purely to sell other products. For example is iTunes or the iPod the razor
blade? Ping is very sanitized and sterile. For the huge launch they did, there
is almost no content preloaded. Plus there is even less freedom then in the
app store.

For posterity, I'd like to record the following message:

These comments were all made when ping sucked. I'm sure that, similarly to the
iPod launch, Apple will fix Ping and use it to destroy facebook. 10 years from
now, all of these comments will look foolish.

Clearly Apple has gotten so good at making winning products they need a fresh
and new challenge. They've set the bar very high for themselves.

------
commieneko
I'll start off by saying that I personally will probably have little use for
Ping. My musical tastes are fairly, shall we say, idiosyncratic.

Having said that, Ping seems to be a targeted product, aimed at a particular
audience. It is a sales tool for music. If you fit the demographic it will
probably work pretty well. My guess is that computer geeks (include me) are
not the demographic Steve is aiming for. If you teenager, and listen to
whatever 90% of teenagers listen to these days, then it might work quite well
for you.

The product's success will not depend on how well people like the typical
Hacker News reader like it...

------
gokhan
Apple is like graphic artists back in the early days of the web. Only
experienced in the controlled print environment, the web pages they designed
was just images on static pages, but not web.

------
paulitex
Anyone else get so annoyed by the flashing little dummy avatars at the bottom
of the page that they couldn't finish the article? Shame too, I was liking it.

(is that an ad? or some kind of 'social feature'?? Something incredibly ironic
about this article if the latter)

~~~
zppx
Explained here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1659814>

------
Qz
What is that random bar of faceless people on the bottom of the article page?

~~~
Swizec
It's LiveNetLife. They're trying to introduce live chatting features into
random websites and I thought I'd give the service a try. Mostly because I
personally know the founder.

~~~
Qz
Oh. Seems interesting... although the UI could use a little softening up. If
there's one thing I agree with Steve Jobs about it's rounded corners.

------
sledmonkey
The biggest problem for me is finding artists and people to follow. Why can
the Genius feature look at my library and suggest music to buy but in Ping I
get 14 suggestions that are all unrelated? Ok, facebook and apple are sorting
things out, but why do i have to enter email addresses? Why can't it look at
my apple address book and at least let me pick from that? Very messy rollout
and I can't help but think apple's secrecy and control is going to burn them
here.

------
protomyth
My one problem is in lieu of adding indy artists, I really wish Ping would
replace the alerts subsystem so I could follow any artist. I finally figured
out how to comment on albums and here is a link on how to like an individual
song ( [http://www.tuaw.com/2010/09/02/itunes-101-liking-a-song-
in-p...](http://www.tuaw.com/2010/09/02/itunes-101-liking-a-song-in-ping/) ).

On the wish side: kill suggested follows, allow comments / like audiobooks,
follow but do not display in profile artist (guilty pleasure).

------
siglesias
>>Fail #4 - obviously commercially inspired music recommendations are
obviously lametastic.

Is this the best critique of Ping HN could find, a poorly written, rage-
infused, explitive-riddled rant fest that one would expect to be found on
digg?

Ping came out _2 bloody days ago_! Who would expect that every niche artist
would be on this thing not even 48 hours in? I'm very impressed with the mix
they got on board pre-launch. Give it a couple of days.

By the way, how many users did Myspace, FB, or Twitter have 2 days in? Let's
use our heads here, folks.

~~~
jokermatt999
Considering they've had the whole Genius recommendations in place for quite
some time now, their complete failure at recommending relevant artists is
pretty bad. I've heard numerous complaints that the recommended artists were
nowhere near the user's taste.

~~~
siglesias
That's likely because artists who are presently on board Ping represent 1% of
1% of all of the artist data that exist in Genius. If the recommendation
engine is giving poor recommendations, it's probably because there is a lack
of variety now, and also because it's still learning based on user behavior.
Again, nothing that time can't solve.

------
houseabsolute
The only one of these that bothers me at all is the dearth of artists on the
network. But that alone is plenty fatal. I guess I'll try it again in a month
and see how uptake is then.

I'd say it's extremely premature to say it will fail, though. But I guess tech
pundits love to jump to conclusions based on opening day impressions.

------
blhack
Here is why ping will fail:

I heard about it a couple of days ago, but never really gave it much thought
because, honestly, I don't really even know what it is _for_. Streaming music?
Better than grooveshark? Not likely if its run by Apple.

After seeing this article (and the one directly below it as of right now), I
decided I should check it out.

Hmmm...do I go to ping.com (no, because I'm pretty sure that ping golf clubs
aren't going to sell their domain), or apple.com/ping? No, that says "the page
you're looking for cannot be found".

Okay, then, duckduckgo it is! Hmm...apple.com/itunes/ping, that is a lot to
type...stupid move, apple, whatever.

 _click_

Annnndddd...nothing? I have to launch iTunes to even see what this is?

iTunes, right, the software that won't let me play half of my audio files
because Apple refuses to allow flac?

So I have to get out my laptop, open it, launch itunes, _then_ figure out how
to get to ping?

The barrier to entry, at least for me, is way to high.

~~~
mcgraw
Well, that's nice, but they're not targeting you. They're targeting the
millions of people that listen to music through iTunes everyday which are
likely wondering what their friends are listening to. If you don't use their
product, or have very little desire to in the first place, it doesn't qualify
as a failure.

------
hyramgraff
This article disappointed me. I was expecting a good hacker's rant about
/sbin/ping.

~~~
danieldk
Exactly :). One nice Slashdot comment:

"That's gonna be awesome for internet help-desk workers. How about creating a
Flickr clone and calling it ifconfig?" (Steauengeglase)

------
athom
Just goes to show how out of the loop I am when it comes to Apple. I read the
title, wondered if it was about the internet echo test command, and then
wondered, how the heck would they screw THAT up??!

------
jckarter
That the author more or less admits to confirmation bias in the very first
paragraph kind of colors their conclusions, regardless of whether Ping
actually sucks or not.

------
DanielN
the really disappointing thing about ping is that unlike last.fm, apple has
access to the binary file for itunes and so could provide even more info about
your listening habits.

I assume last.fm's scrobbler works entirely from the unencrypted itunes file
which only gives play count.

------
KirinDave
An inflammatory jackass who doesn't know who Yo-Yo Ma is and who thinks Apple
would ever consider Gravatar support gets this much interest on news.ycomb?
And did you notice it's a self-submit? Classy.

Lately it seems like this discussion group has become increasingly anti-Apple.
It didn't use to be this way, originally it was far more neutral. I wonder
what's changed?

~~~
dhess
> _Lately it seems like this discussion group has become increasingly anti-
> Apple. It didn't use to be this way, originally it was far more neutral. I
> wonder what's changed?_

HN is frequented by developers. Probably, the increased hostility is at least
partly a reaction to Apple's iOS App Store policies.

~~~
KirinDave
Really? Is there that much ire? Why don't they get over it and dev for
android?

------
hopeless
So Ping won't be available outside of the U.S.? Well, thank f*+k for that!

~~~
danieldk
Huh? I am using Ping without any problems from the Netherlands, with a Dutch
iTunes account.

------
dstnbrkr
Stopped reading when he said he didn't know Yo-Yo Ma.

------
jcromartie
I don't know why Apple thought anybody wanted this.

------
code_duck
Yeah, well... so is Facebook, so is Twitter, so is Windows, so is pretty much
everything. Who cares.

------
orenmazor
your itunes account is "hacked"? pimped out, is it? is it lowered too?
hellaflush.

no, ping is not very useful right now. I'm sure they'll figure out how to
improve it. apple frequently starts with a small wedge and then innovates on
top of it.

~~~
gloob
It is worth noting that said "small wedge" has (historically) been a _good_
small wedge. The point is, people seem unconvinced of the magicality or
revolutionariness of this particular wedge.

~~~
orenmazor
people are frequently unconvinced of a lot of things. and that's a good thing.
its the fundamental principle of science.

its the reaction and tone that bother me, not the content.

------
muhfuhkuh
So, that settles it: No scrobbling. Less artists than last.fm. Lame. [1]

Looks like ping is another home run.

[1]With all apologies to Rob Malda:
<http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23/1816257>

