Ping Now Works With Your Actual iTunes Library. This Is A Thousand Times Better
It launched with much fanfare, but I don't think it was unreasonable to call Ping a dud out of the gate. While pretty much everyone initially signed up to try it out, a few days later, the activity stream seemed to trickle to almost nothing.
Context & Ripple Effects
Ping arrived on September 1 as the centerpiece of Apple's social-commerce ambitions, and hit one million users within 48 hours — but by late September the same outlets that covered the launch were calling it a dud, with the activity stream going quiet days after signups. A key handicap was social: per Silicon Alley Insider reporting, Apple spent over a year in talks with Facebook and then launched Ping without any Facebook integration, leaving the network with no graph to feed off.
The September 25 update changes what Ping draws on instead: iTunes 10.0.1 hooks Ping directly into users' actual iTunes libraries, so activity reflects real listening rather than manual curation inside an empty social network. MacStories' writeup of the same release highlights the new Ping Sidebar, suggesting this is Apple repositioning Ping around the media player itself rather than around friend invites.
First-order effects
- Existing Ping users who abandoned the trickle of an empty activity stream get a concrete reason to return, since their library listening now generates content automatically.
- Apple gets a self-sustaining activity signal inside its own installed base of iTunes users, partially substituting for the Facebook partnership it launched without.
Second-order effects
- With no external social graph, Ping's discovery loop runs on purchases and listening history, pushing music recommendation power toward Apple's own data rather than toward friends' taste networks like MySpace or Last.fm-style services.
- Artists and labels using Ping pages gain an activity feed tied to actual buying behavior, making the GigaOM social-commerce framing testable against real conversion rather than signup counts.
Third-order effects
- If anchoring a social layer in owned media consumption works where a standalone social network did not, platform companies learn that social commerce needs a behavioral data spine first and a friend graph second — a template other media owners could copy.
The trend: Social music networks are shifting from standalone friend-graph products toward activity layers built on top of existing media-consumption data.