Posts tagged Ping
Apple Adds Social Playlists to Ping
Dec 13th
Ping, Apple’s half-hearted attempt at its own music-focused social networking site, has finally received an update worth noting: Social Playlists. On Friday, the iTunes-only website Ping added a new feature which lets you create a playlist of your favorite songs. Those playlists can then be published for your Ping followers to rate and review or even collaborate on with you.
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How Social Playlists Work
To access the new feature, click on the “Ping” icon in the left-hand sidebar in iTunes to be taken to the social networking site. From there, look for the “Ping Playlists” section on the right side and click on “Create a New Playlist.”
On the Playlist creation page, you fill out a title, description and can check a box that reads “Allow people who follow me to add songs” if you want to create a collaborative playlist with friends. However, in typical Apple fashion, the songs for your playlist can only come from the iTunes store – there’s no option to add your own MP3′s from your music collection.
Ping: Dead in the Water?
While this update brings what’s now one of the only notable features for Ping, as a whole, the social network is incredibly unremarkable. Although iPad integration and Twitter connectivity was added last month, Ping still lacks Facebook connectivity for finding friends or sharing music socially. And even the Twitter integration did not seem to pay off for Ping - our analysis of Twitter revealed a low volume of tweets and no re-tweets shortly after the feature was launched.
As our own Marshall Kirkpatrick described it, the Ping user experience is “totally focused on commerce not community.”
The new social playlists feature again confirms Apple’s stance on “social” once again is about money, not users. Without options for users to add their own esoteric, indie tracks from unsigned artists, Ping isn’t serving as a place where music fans can find the next big thing, it’s serving as yet another pointer to the virtual cash registers on iTunes.
What’s more, according to a recent article from music technology blog Hypebot, Ping to date only has around 2,000 artists on board, an incredibly low level of participation considering the network’s potential to reach iTunes’ 160 million users. At launch, Apple said artist profiles were invite-only but “any iTunes user can create a profile on Ping, artist or otherwise.” Distributers like Tunecore and CD Baby who serve indie musicians are now helping artists create Ping profiles. So why haven’t more done so?
Where are the Artists?
According to a comment on Hypebot from Peter at TuneCore, the company has set up more than 1,000 of its artists with Ping accounts…which begs the question, if half of the 2,000 are from TuneCore, then how many has Apple actually “invited?” Where is everyone?
MySpace?
Perhaps. Fast Company said that the flailing News Corp-owned social network hosts eight million artists currently, while Apple is slowing adding “worthy” artists one-by-one. Meanwhile, Apple also posted a 9-page rule book for any other artists interested in joining the Ping network. The book includes a bizarre list of no-no’s for artists on Ping like a ban URLs in the About section of a Ping profile (artists can’t mention their own website?) and no posting links to other content providers or ads for sites outside of iTunes. It even recommends artists don’t recommend only their own songs to their fans. It’s likely that the limitations put into place have discourage some artist participation, but ultimately, it’s Ping’s overall lackluster appeal that is dragging it down.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Low Volume and No Retweets: Ping Is Not Going Viral on Twitter
Nov 19th
Last week, Apple launched a partnership with Twitter that allows the users of its Ping social network to send their likes to their Twitter streams. Using Microsoft’s Archivist, we tapped into the Twitter firehose over the last few days and took a look at how Ping is doing on Twitter. Before the launch of this integration, there was a lot of talk about how Ping was a major failure for Apple. Indeed, the total number of tweets from Ping per-day hovers somewhere around 3,000, with a spike up to 4,000 on Wednesday after the Beatles catalog arrived on iTunes.
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Clearly, Ping is not going viral on Twitter yet. Indeed, users barely ever retweet a Ping like. Only 1.4% of the Ping likes we analyzed were retweets. By comparison, almost 6% of links to the increasingly popular Instagram mobile photo sharing site were retweets. While we can’t compare the two directly, it is also worth noting that we regularly saw more than 400 Instagram tweets within half an hour, while we barely saw more than 50-60 Ping likes on Twitter in the same time period. While that’s great for Instagram, that’s not a good sign for Ping.
Our own Marshall Kirkpatrick described Ping on Twitter as a “non-starter” earlier this week and judging from this data, a lot of Twitter and iTunes users feel the same way.
Note: The data for 11/19 is incomplete. We also only looked at tweets in English.
A Few More Observations:
- Those who used Ping’s like function to sent Tweets to Ping only used it a few times from what we could see. There are some power-users who sent over 100 Ping likes to their Twitter friends over the course of the week, but those are in the minority (and probably annoyed their followers to no end).
- It doesn’t come as a surprise that the top words in these tweets (Beatles, Box Set, John)have to do with the Beatles – after all, the full Beatles catalog came to iTunes earlier this week and quickly dominated the charts there.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Twitter Plus iTunes Ping is a Non-Starter
Nov 11th
Twitter announced a partnership with Apple this morning that amounts to this: you can now post links to song previews on Twitter from inside iTunes Ping.
Most of Twitter’s other partnerships are very interesting. Streamed Tweets on top of Current.tv’s live Presidential Debate videos. Real-time search results inside Google and Bing. Twitter-branded bottles of wine sold to raise money for needy children. But Tweeting music previews from Ping? That is not very interesting. Now you can push iTunes ads into your friends’ Twitter stream from inside a social network no one uses. That’s not exciting, it’s depressing.
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Ping Ping
For a good overview of Ping’s shortcomings, see BuzzFeed’s post Ping Fail: 5 Reasons To Avoid Joining Apple’s Social Network. The long and the short of it is this: the user experience is unappealing and it’s totally focused on commerce not community.
In other words, Ping is like the opposite of Twitter. I asked Twitter about this and was told the following: I should have some more coffee (that’s true), this feature adds music to the Twitter side panel (but only 30 seconds of it) and Apple has told labels that it intends to expand iTunes previews to 90 seconds (big whoop). So far the music player doesn’t seem to work yet, either. Clicking on a shared music link from iTunes launches the iTunes store. No fun.
This is the internet, where if you want me to buy music you’re going to have to make it really easy and compelling. This doesn’t pass that test in my mind.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Ping – Apple’s Music Social Network: New Social Media Marketing Territory – The Brainchild Group – Marketing News (blog)
Sep 5th
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Ping – Apple's Music Social Network: New Social Media Marketing Territory
The Brainchild Group – Marketing News (blog) Are there linking opportunities for SEO? How much traffic/exposure can Ping generate? It's important to find answers to these questions, and others, … |
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