Staying Ahead of the Curve

The following video above is a tour to Apple's latest social networking site " ITunes Ping" 

“ITunes Ping” was launched on September 1^st 2010. As said by Steve Jobs" Ping is Facebook and Twitter meets ITunes". Ping is a social networking site where music lovers and fans can come together to follow and get updates about their favorite artists. Unfortunately for Apple, success in the social networking sites is difficult to pursue. Even if the company has about 50 million users making it a success, it cannot be compared to Facebook’s 500 million active users.  ITunes Ping was promoted as a medium where people could connect with artists online. Pings main focus is to influence the social music discovery. The latest ITunes attempt is very smart as it would generate the purchase of music rather than illegal downloading. Another benefit to Ping is that it can be easily accessed via the iPhone and iPod touch allowing mobile use. Ping is not available to mobile devices except of apple, this allows more sales in these products as well. One interesting aspect of Ping is its charts which serves as a recommendation tool regarding the latest and famous songs popular among kids in today's day and age. It shows the most frequent and recent purchased music , not liked, rated or reviewed items. The creation of this product is more of a marketing scheme.

A huge factor behind its failure was the fact that such a concept was already being done by Twitter. Ping is something like Twitter where you can follow the artists that you like. One can find their friends, post about purchases they make from ITunes, and can recommend/ like/ follow an album, song, or artist found within the service. In comparison to the two leading social sites – Facebook and Twitter. People using ITunes Ping can’t do the things they do on Facebook and Twitter like updating their status messages or as most Facebook addicts do, read through other people’s comments and status messages as part of their everyday entertainment. Ping also lacks integration of existing social networks. Some sections of a user's Ping profile might not be easily understood . For instance do not click on " My reviews" when you want to write a review, you'll have to go elsewhere in iTunes for that. Controls for the interface are small and specific. The user has to be pretty accurate "when clicking on that five pixel -wide arrow " or they'll land up in a completely different part of the site and will have to start all over again. 

Even the sign up process for ITunes Ping is very tedious, contributing to its lack of use. Apple says ITunes Ping had attracted more than one million users in the first 48 hours of launch. There haven’t been very few recent sign posts since then. Ping is struggling to attract users because of its wearisome sign up process as ITunes has become so slow with each version. One has to download the version 10 of the ITunes in order to have access to Ping. Ping is applicable in only 23 countries and hasn't gone global. 

Ping never "rolled uphill".  Apple just wanted to release a social network but didn’t think it through. Maybe this is a head start for Apple to start focusing more on quality than quantity. Ping is relatively still a new technology. It has a long way to go as it has the potential to be one of the great social networking sites. Ping can become bigger and better if apple takes the initiative to make changes and update the product. One thing which apple is good at is taking the user's feedback and applying it as soon as possible. 


For a music lover like me, Ping could be exactly what we're looking for as it personifies an open mind to discover new styles of music which contributes to the constant change and evolution in the music industry. 

References

http://mashable.com/2010/09/01/itunes-ping/
http://musicmusic.com/articles/will-apples-itunes-10-ping-music-social-network-be-successful-or-a-failure-will-steve-jobs-marketing-strategy-succeed-or-fail.html