Friday 24 September 2010

iTunes Ping - First Impressions

So I joined Ping, iTunes' "social network for music", essentially a Facebook in miniaturised form for music-lovers. In short, Ping allows you to follow your favourite music artists, alerting you of their recent activity, any artists they in turn are following, and allowing you to post comments on their profile. You can also follow friends and fellow Ping users, and (if you so wish in your Privacy settings) let them follow you, thus allowing you to recommend music artists to them and vice versa, as well as making any iTunes music purchases visible. And having spent a few hours playing around with it, here are my initial thoughts.

First off, it's pretty clunky. The presentation side of things is relatively okay, with a menu bar on the right-hand side consisting of just "Recent Activity","My Reviews", "People" and "Featured". Simple enough, but click on any of these menu bar options, and the menu (along with the "Find People" browser" tends to disappear; to recover it you have to click "Ping" on the top menu. A small annoyance, admittedly, but one that compunds the fact that finding the artists that you actually want to follow on Ping is unecessarily difficult. You would think Apple would've been able to sync this feature with your existing iTunes library, and automatically recommend artists that exist both in Ping and within your library. But no, you have to either type in the artist you're looking for, or trawl through the hundreds of "recommended" artists, few of which actually bear any semblance to your particular tastes in music.

At this early stage, the number of artists available to follow on Ping is understandably limited, although that's not to say there's not some interesting inclusions; amongst the artists I follow are HEALTH, Nico Muhly, Gang Gang Dance and Menomena. However, it seems like the artists are just as unsure on how to utilise Ping as the average Joe. The most recent post (at the time of writing) from HEALTH says it all; "So I think PING is really about discussion, communication. Good back and forth format, not so good for bulletins. And you can't list tourdates." Well, actually you can list tourdates, albeit in the unwieldy form of continuous prose rather than an actual list. Also, of the 20 or so artists I currently follow, none have posted in the past 5 days, which doesn't exactly fill you with confidence over the usefulness of Ping. Of course, you could choose to follow iTunes tools Coldplay, and be informed every time Chris Martin goes to take a crap, if you so wish.

For all its faults, there is potential in Ping. It's useful, particularly from a music blogger's perspective, to see the recent announcements of all your favourite artists there on one page (if they bother to post anything at all, that is). I also like the more personable nature that some artists, like HEALTH, have adopted for Ping, as opposed to the more sterile self-promotion tactics of other artists, and it's good to see the albums artists are currently listening to, as well as the artists they themselves follow. It's just disappointing that with Facebook and Twitter having been around for so long, that Apple couldn't make the first incarnation of Ping better defined and more user-friendly. I guess that's something they can work on over the zillion updates that will occur between now and iTunes 11.

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