I’ve been hearing a lot about Ping, the music-based social network that’s been added to Apple’s iTunes 10 system, but don’t really get it. Can you show me how to get started and share some thoughts on whether it’s worth the effort to join or not, Dave?
I’d describe Ping as a sort of half-hearted music social network, but this early into the launch phase it’s not yet gained enough momentum to be interesting. The problem is that a music-based network should have musicians involved, or at least be able to offer recommendations in the vein of “since you like Joe Jackson, you’ll also like…”
Ping has over a million users signed up, but in my social circle, at least, I’m one of the very few on the network, and I don’t want to know what my friends like to listen to anyway, I want to know what people who like the kind of music and musicians I have enjoy.
It’s a difficult problem and falls into the category of “resource discovery”. Me? Way too much of my iTunes library is music I’ve listened to for the last decade or longer. Boring.
Still, let’s get you up and going with Ping, then we’ll come back to the discussion, okay?
Step zero: make sure you have iTunes 10 running on your computer. Easily done: just launch iTunes and go to iTunes –> About iTunes. If not, grab the latest copy from Apple.com.
On the left side, you’ll see something new in the “STORE” area:
Click on “Ping” to get started and you’ll get a little advert…
Sounds good, click on “Turn On Ping” and you’ll need to log in to your iTunes Store account, as you’d hope would be the case:
Remembered your password? Awesome! Now you can start tweaking your account to reflect how you want to be shown in Ping:
The most interesting area is where you indicate your favorite genres. As far as I can tell, this is based on what music you’ve bought from iTunes, not based on a full scan of your entire music library:
Yeah, the “Pop”? That’s my daughter’s music purchases… 🙂
I’ll continue and get to a prompt that I don’t really understand, but probably will prove important down the road:
Now the most important of these settings: your privacy setting. I applaud Apple for making this easy and straightforward (unlike, say, Facebook):
I don’t really understand why you’d sign up for the Ping social network if you didn’t want to actually participate, but maybe that makes sense to you. Pick the right option (and remember you can always tweak things later) and proceed…
Here’s where the lack of musicians is a drag… I scroll down just a bit and it shows me artists it recommends I follow, but I don’t have any music from any of them:
So what’s the point? If the recommendations were for my favorites (easily ascertained by scanning my music library and correlating quantity of selections against frequency of play) that’d be cool, but here they’re just not interesting to me, and since I don’t know them, the recommendations that they have aren’t likely to be interesting to me either…
Scroll down a bit further and it’s even stranger:
Who are these people? I have no idea. So, no, I’m not interested in people who a) are unknown and b) probably have musical purchases in common with me that don’t actually reflect the breadth and depth of my musical tastes.
So far I have to say that I’m not impressed with Ping. Maybe down the road it’ll be more interesting as it can actually be smart in how it figures out my musical tastes and helps me discover new music to expand my horizons, but now? I’ll pass…
Thanks for the intro to Ping. I recently upgraded to iTunes 10 and was wondering what it was about.
I agree that it sounds like it would be better if it were to follow Amazon’s lead with “people who bought this also bought” information. That sounds more useful than, say, what music my brother-in-law listens to. Maybe once they have more data from more people?