I've been watching Apple closely for its first move into social territory. Whether you call Ping its first move, or iWork.com, or even MobileMe... we could debate that. Nevertheless, Apple sees and is marketing Ping as its first move into "social networking" by calling Ping a "Social network that's all about music."
It makes perfect sense for Apple, a company whose resurgence was fueled by a digital music device known as the iPod. The question is, will Ping stick? Or, like a network ping, will it reach out, report back some interesting data, and then be no more (I'm looking at you, Yahoo Meme...)
[UPDATE 9/03/2010: Ping no longer allows users to "pull in" their friends from Facebook. The only way to establish more connections is via email. Unless this changes, Ping will very quickly join Meme and Buzz and Google Wave as an unused, money-wasting investment for those who spend time there trying to engage people for meaningful reasons]
My Vote
I played with Ping for 20 minutes or so tonight--watched a couple videos posted by U2 and DMB; updated my profile; figured out how the privacy stuff works. My gut reaction as a web strategy guy? It has the makings of a very sticky network. The analogy that works for me is, As Facebook's Places is to Foursquare and Gowalla, so Apple's Ping is to last.fm and lala.com. Note: Apple bought lala.com.
There's not much to talk about in terms of interface, ground-breaking features. It really is "Facebook meets Twitter meets iTunes." The big story is that Apple's leveraging a huge, fully-vested user base and allowing them to all interact with each other around a very meaningful context. Everyone has to come to iTunes to buy stuff, connect & upgrade devices. It will be very natural for folks to dip into Ping to keep up with the human side of their music experience. It's a recipe for success, even moreso than a Facebook or Twitter because it's niche, but a very huge niche. In contrast to Google Buzz, which wanted everyone to do what they did on Facebook and Twitter, only Google-style, Ping is asking users to interact around their music with their friends, something that no heavy hitter specifically asks folks to do.
Where to from here?
I believe Phase II of Apple's move will be to finally sunset iTunes as a piece of software that must needs live as an application on your computer. People have been shouting "iTunes in the cloud!" for quite some time now, but in typical Apple fashion, they're moving slowly and deliberately in that direction, not losing site of what a good user experience iTunes still is for the average user.
Two of the moves today confirm to me a move toward (not to) cloud-based user experiences:
1) The new Apple TV does not allow downloads of any kind. Only rentals. The hard drive has been rendered a non-player (hard disk space, which it must have to at least store rentals, is not listed even in the Tech Specs). Everything is going toward "on demand." iTunes as a whole will move that direction as well; Apple TV is the one setting the precedent in this case.
2) Apple bought LaLa and is creating a huge data center. They purchased the best streaming-based music experience service online, and they're building a huge data center that will enable on-demand experiences to be great.
The move away from desktop-based iTunes will empower better real-time experiences such as geolocation (I'm at this concert right now!) and generally get the iTunes experience out to the rest of the Internet rather than the other way around (Facebook's doing the same thing right now, once you think about it).
My only concern for Apple in all this is how bad the company has performed in the cloud/streaming space thus far. Mobile Me has had plenty of false starts specifically around just getting things working properly, and iWork.com has been adopted just about as well as Google Buzz (i.e. not well at all).
But I'm thinking Ping may be their first win in the real-time game. Let's see how it plays out, shall we?
