Why Ping Is the Future of Social Commerce
Apple announced on Wednesday a cornucopia of new hardware and software: sleek iPods, a brand new Internet-enabled video streaming device and new versions of its iOS software and iTunes 10. However, the most impressive to me by far was Ping …
Context & Ripple Effects
At its September 1, 2010 music event Apple shipped a full hardware-and-software refresh — new iPods including a dual-camera iPod Touch, a redesigned $99 streaming Apple TV, iOS updates, and iTunes 10 — but the piece GigaOM singles out is Ping, the social network embedded directly in iTunes. Steve Jobs used the day to explain why Facebook is not part of it, signaling that Apple built the layer alone rather than partnering on identity.
The story traveled fast on launch day, with BoomTown, TechCrunch, Gizmodo and The Next Web all picking it up alongside the hardware news — evidence that the social-in-iTunes question, not the new iPods, was what the press wanted to argue about.
First-order effects
- Ping gives Apple a social graph layered directly over the world's largest music-purchase log inside iTunes 10, so every follow, review and artist page doubles as a merchandising surface.
- Facebook is conspicuously absent from the launch — Jobs publicly fielded the question — leaving Apple's network running on Apple-only accounts rather than imported friend lists.
Second-order effects
- Social networks and rival digital-media stores now face an incumbent that owns both the catalog and the checkout: if Ping's recommendation loop works, competitors must either build their own purchase-backed social layers or partner for reach.
- Record-industry marketing shifts toward whoever routes discovery — artist pages and curated picks inside iTunes become paid-placement inventory that did not exist when downloads were a plain store.
Third-order effects
- If embedding social features into a transaction engine proves out, commerce platforms generally will treat their purchase histories as social-graph assets — 'social commerce' moving from a bolt-on widget to a feature of the store itself.
- The counter-risk, visible in the same-week skepticism about whether users will adopt yet another walled-garden network, is that a social layer built without open identity partners stalls at the size of the vendor's own installed base.
The trend: Digital storefronts are turning their own purchase data into social networks, making the owner of the transaction record — not the standalone social platform — the likely controller of media discovery.