Apple Ping

~ the goodbye ~

i did not see ping at the time. itunes was not a thing i opened often in 2010. i was on windows. my music sat in local mp3 folders ripped off cds or pulled from the file-share era, and the only itunes installs i had ever run were the ones bundled with an ipod nano sync. by 2010 i was not even doing that, my phone was running android. ping was a feature inside a piece of apple software that did not really live on my desktop, and the announcement on 1 september 2010 reached me as a tech news headline rather than something to try.

the pitch on stage was steve jobs in good form. ping was a social network that lived inside itunes 10. you followed artists. you saw what your friends had bought, with concert recommendations layered in based on the music in your library. jobs said it was sort of like facebook and twitter meet itunes. the demo showed facebook integration: a list of facebook friends already inside ping, ready to connect.

that demo did not survive the next 24 hours. apple and facebook had not finished licensing talks. facebook blocked the api access apple had been using, and apple had to ship ping without the friend-discovery feature that was the whole point. by the end of launch week the security firm sophos was logging spam waves selling free iphones and ipads on ping profiles. ben folds publicly reported a fake account impersonating him. apple had not built spam filtering for a network it had announced as a discovery layer for music.

ping shipped to 23 countries, the same itunes-store countries that already had full music purchasing. it stayed live for two years and one month with almost no engagement. on 12 september 2012 itunes 11 was announced, with direct facebook and twitter share buttons replacing the ping tab. ping itself was switched off on 30 september 2012. apple did not put out a statement longer than two sentences.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it tried to do ~

the music-discovery problem ping was trying to solve was real in 2010. itunes had a store with millions of tracks but no good way to find new ones based on what your friends were buying. the recommendation engine was mostly a flat genius algorithm running on your library. ping was supposed to put a social layer on top of that, the way last.fm had done for music in general and the way myspace music had done for artists. the difference was that ping wanted to be both at once, and to live inside the itunes app rather than on the open web.

the design choices made sense in isolation. a ping profile had a photo, a list of followed artists, an activity feed, and a slot for a most-recent-track. you could like a track or post a comment about a concert. lady gaga and yoko ono showed up on launch day as featured artists. apple put the ping tab next to the music store and the itunes radio entry, which was meant to push users into it without asking.

~ what went wrong ~

the facebook break was the loud failure. for most observers it was also the only one that mattered, because without a friend graph ping was a network with no edges. you could follow lady gaga but you could not easily find that your three actual friends were also on ping. apple tried to build a discovery flow from your address book and your itunes purchase history. neither worked at scale.

the second piece was that ping required you to want a separate social layer for music in 2010, the year facebook was hitting 500 million users globally and twitter was becoming the place celebrities posted directly. asking people to maintain a third social profile inside itunes was a hard sell. the people who cared deeply about music social were already on last.fm. the people who cared about celebrity music feeds were already on twitter. ping sat in the gap and never found a clean reason for anyone to log into it twice.

~ the next chapter ~

apple tried again in june 2015 with apple music connect, a social feed for artists inside the new apple music subscription. connect ran for three years before apple folded it into the main artist pages in 2018. the lesson apple seemed to take from ping was not "do not try social music" but "try social music but with less surface area." both attempts failed for the same reason. people did not want a music-only social network from apple. they wanted apple music to be a good place to listen to music, and they wanted their social life on the network they already used.

ping survives now as a punchline in keynote retrospectives and as a footnote in the longer story of apple's struggle with anything that needs a social graph. it ran for two years and one month, longer than google buzz and shorter than google+, and it ended quietly enough that most people who used itunes daily in those years did not notice when the tab disappeared.

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