Idée Fixins

As I watched Steve introduce Ping last week, I was impressed. Sure, he came off like an uncool dad trying to sound hip while talking about music—who name-drops the “Honda Civic Tour”?—but the project itself seemed like a natural, reasonable way for Apple to get into social networking, and an addition to the iTunes experience that some/many people would enjoy.

But then I played with it. And it’s terrible. So what went wrong? 

You can’t DO anything with it. You can’t post a status message about a song or an artist or a lyric that’s stuck in your head. You can’t click “like” on a track you’re listening to in iTunes. You can’t find any artists on there to follow, other than megastars like Lady Gaga and guys I don’t know like Rick Rubin. (OK, that last failing will probably change as more artists starting Ping™ing, but the rest seem permanent.)

The only way to express yourself with Ping is to buy things or make comments about your friends’ purchases. Campaign finance reform opponents argue that money equals speech, but even they don’t claim that money is the only way to speak.

My theory is that Ping is so bad because it was made by the iTunes STORE team, instead of the iTunes team. It feels like a product made in a profit-focused silo without any real thought given to how it fits into the whole, or what actual everyday users would want. It’s like a new feature dreamed up by the Photoshop-Layers-Sidebar Team that has no hooks to the rest of the program.

You can’t even get to it from your iTunes library. And on the iPhone where the listening app is discrete from the buying app (rather than being part of one massive conglomerated-but-contiguous mess) it’s even further removed.

In addition to being a bad experience, is extremely disappointing to see from Apple. This is exactly the kind of thing they’re supposed to be so good at. 

UPDATE 9/7: Seems like you can click “Like” on an album without buying it. But only from within the iTunes Store—not from within iTunes.