Is Ping Your Thing?

September 3rd, 2010

Apple have just released iTunes 10, and with the addition of Ping – it’s given them the chance to dip their toes into social media. I’ve only had a short amount of time to play with Ping and from what I can see it’s seems like a very closed network – restricting itself to just iTunes, there was supposed to be an option to connect and find your Facebook friends – but this was removed on launch. Now the only way to find friends is to search by name – which is a little hit and miss. Also, there’s no short vanity style URL that you can point your friends towards, although there is a work around;

• From the Ping menu in the iTunes store, use the drop down and click on ‘My Profile’.
• Right Click (Option + Click) on your name at the top of the page, you’ll access a small menu – click on ‘Copy Link’.
• You now have a direct URL link to your profile that when clicked on will open iTunes and view your profile page, allowing people to easily find and follow you. The URL looks something like this;
  http://c.itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZConnections.woa/wa/viewProfile?userId=114837797
• As the link isn’t exactly very short or easy to remember, I logged into my bit.ly account and created a custom short URL; http://bit.ly/pingmartinlucas – much better.

At the moment the network seems very geared towards the masses, initial recommendations are the same for everyone – so along with everyone else I was directed to follow artists such as Lady Gaga, U2 and Jack Johnson. It’s a shame that Apple couldn’t give me a more tailored set of artists to follow – they know enough about my music purchasing and listening habits to understand that I wouldn’t want to follow any of these people.

There were also some teething problems with uploading a photo, after multiple attempts my photo wotuld not upload. I searched Twitter to see if anyone else had the same problem (many did), and some had a solution – using a 250 x 250 pixel image, this seemed to work and my image is now awaiting approval online!

At the moment and for me, Ping isn’t going to replace LastFM as a recommendation engine as it’s tricky to find people who are into the same music as I am, but I think it could still work out very well for Apple. If Ping encourages people to review and ‘like’ releases on the iTunes store – it could lead to more purchases. There was a case study (in Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point I believe) where by a certain number of reviews on an Amazon product page was able to influence people in to making a purchase, I’m sure 27 was the magic number, they didn’t all have to be positive reviews either. Once a product has 27 or more reviews the purchase rate starts to substantially increase.

I’m definitely tempted to review a couple of recent purchases, just to get some content into my own Ping stream, and if this creates a cycle where I get more followers then I could stick with Ping.

So if Ping is your thing, you can follow me here; http://bit.ly/pingmartinlucas

Tags: apple, itunes, music, ping, social media, social networking