So Apple launched a new Social Networking service along with a few new products last week. I signed up on Ping when it was announced, or when iTunes 10 went live and have been using it since a week. So whats Ping? Just your own profile with activity of accounts you follow. More like facebook status updates where you can write comments. Apple’s intention was to allow people to discover music by following people and encountering new music that they like. Another thing with Ping is that you can follow music artists and get updates from them directly. This is one of the popular features of Ping. However the down side is that only a handful of artists are on Ping and most of the artists are not registered. This is one of the things that breaks Ping’s usability. Another issue is finding people you know or adding friends. Initially Apple had Facebook Connect that allowed you to see your facebook friends who use Ping and add them. But due to some issues, Apple silently pulled that feature out of Ping. So what’s left? Well.. you can follow people who you know are on Ping and see what they like in iTunes Store or what they purchase from iTunes Store, if at all they use iTunes Store. In a nutshell, I think Ping is a failure as most people I asked about Ping said that its useless so they have turned it off. The only people using it right now are techies. They are just testing the new service out. Other than that, Apple, I think you should keep out of the social networking business…
Sep 06
Mar 31
Apple just pushed the iTunes 9.1 update that adds iPad and iBooks support as iPad shipping starts this Saturday, which is just a couple of days away. It is going to be interesting to see iBooks sales as Amazon Kindle is currently the leader in eBooks with the massive Kindle Store.
Jan 07
MacWorld has always been a great time meeting the Apple guys and socialising. However, this was the last MacWorld. Lets take a look at MacWorld 2009.
Thanks to Engadget for the pictures.
Post after the break. Click “Continue Reading”.
