Apple's ping is a big pile of steaming dung | Hacker News Reader

Apple's ping is a big pile of steaming dung

swizec.com

158 pointsSwizec105 comments

I pretty much had the same experience.

For comparison I found Muse had a stream on Ping so I checked it compared to their Twitter account. Ping's stream for them was sanitized and small. It was not personal and I assume it didn't tell me anything other than what the label wanted me to know.

With full access to my very large library including many albums purchased in ITMS, they suggested a series of artists I have no interest in.

Activity is only measured by what you purchase or review in the ITMS, not on what I actually do in iTunes. They have an opportunity to steal everyones lunch with Ping. Mirroring last.fm functionality with scrobbling and then presenting that info in the profile is a no-brainer.

When looking at my profile, I noticed that the two things it pointed as were two reviews I made in iTunes from years ago. Fresh content is king.

The interface is terrible. Navigating around Ping is a mess.

Granted this is a 1.0, but they have a lot of work to do if they want it to get serious traction and they need to loosen the content reigns a bit. Waiting for my profile pic to be approved is silly.

I could understand not supporting last.fm integration. Sure, they want to sort of kill last.fm anyway.

But the fact there is no scrobbling of played music? That's just silly, what on earth were they thinking? O.o

Honestly, I'd like to know, can ANYONE explain that?

Sure. If I had to guess, I'd say that Apple's stretched extremely thin, their products are worked on by surprisingly small teams, they were under time pressure to get this out the door, the culture of secrecy kept them from doing some user testing, and (given the number of small details Ping got wrong) this particular project didn't have strong product leadership with experience in the space.

I did no user testing (just did what I thought was obvious), I only had 3 months, I worked by myself (mostly), and my site, http://like.fm, doesn't suffer from most of his fail points. I think apple just wanted to add a slight social layer to their store.. You know, to drive sales. I mean if you are one to buy stuff from the iTunes store, you'll probably sign up and follow something. Other people who use the service aren't immediately going to be much value. I mean why else would they make a "social network" embedded in iTunes. You just can't expect something like that to get enough meaningful adoption if it's exclusive to a single platform in a heavily segmented market. So apple wasn't crazy (they just can't be that blind), they just wanted to add a light social layer to iTunes store to boost sales.

I wonder if they didn't want to do a Buzz in terms of making all your private information suddenly public, and might ease into features such as scrobbling over time. The amount of spam on there is probably their biggest problem at the moment. It is hard for me to objectively judge as my market segment isn't catered for at all in terms of features. It will be interesting to see what the rest of the population think of it. To me it feels far to much like it has been designed to drive consumption of 'popular' music and 'me too' buying.

EDIT: The top 10 pop chart artists all seem to have around 100k followers, will be interesting to see how it goes.

Even if they do ease in scrobbling their "social network" will be crippled by the fact that your Winamp buddy, or Rdio friend, or Linux pal doesn't use iTunes. For Ping to succeed they're going to have to convince users that their platform is dedicated to social music, not enhancing the itunes purchasing experience. So unless iTunes gets every music listener in the world, or darn close to everyone, to use iTunes instead of however they currently listen to music, then their social functionality is going to always be less useful than a platform independent service. A social network gains value with more users (in general), so if iTunes is restricting the flow of potential users it's just going to hurt them.

iTunes could satisfy the iTunes user market. But unless clusters of friends all use iTunes, a decentralized service will be more useful. And i'm not sure if being an itunes user means more of your friends use itunes (to any level of significancy). So chances are most people will have a bunch of friends who can't participate.

Or just as likely.

Apple do what they always do.

Not everything that is possible only what is necessary.

Apple have entered the social space, it's official, people will now know.

Then they will improve on it step by step.

It's obvious that the problems with facebook integration is also affecting our perception a great deal.

Honestly, I'd like to know, can ANYONE explain that?

The only thing I can think of is that reviewing or purchasing through ITMS requires more active engagement, instead of the more passive scrobbling. Of course this engagement requires more effort, but they want people to purchase through iTunes and review things in ITMS anyway, perhaps they like to provide an extra incentive to do so, and at the same time make you more loyal to ITMS instead of other competitive music stores online?

I'm not sure I would've made the same decision (realizing that people are lazy by nature and want their music profile to be built automatically), but these are the only arguments I can think of.

Also, if it relayed anything that you played, some unsavory results might be relayed (and if it only relayed Apple purchased tracks there would be complaints).

For example, why Amazon doesn't "scrobble" every physical object I use instead of only showing the things they sell that I deliberately review ...

A lot of people are going to want to present a different music profile than their actual listening habits.

Amazon is not claiming to be a social network.

Social networks sell themselves to users based on what the users can share and display about themselves to their social network. The more that a user can shape his persona (by revealing different information) the more appealing a social network will be to users, a big reason why facebook is so popular is exactly for this reason: it allows you to shape your presence in a very varied way (this is why pages is a killer feature).

To describe ping, apple should have really said that its a social network for ITMS, not a social network for music.

Amazon did announce personal profile pages, etc., but then pushed them into the background a bit. Some of the social groups are surprisingly active.

Someone's profile:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/pdp/profile/A2KEKKJ9CAC2KC/

Communities home page:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/tagging/communities/directory

Music community home page:

http://www.amazon.com/communities/directory/music/ref=tag_td...

A people affinity page, in this case, cats:

http://www.amazon.com/tag/cats/people/ref=tag_cdp_bkt_icus

Agree with your point that for now "it's a social network for ITMS". Seems a better way of thinking about it, and dovetails with defaulting to off and using ITMS account (a can of worms).

One of PG's main things is "push 1.0 out as quickly as possible." Maybe that's what Apple is doing here, and they're already working on scrobbling.

But that's not Apple's style. Their style is "be amaaaazed at our new thing! It is perfect in every way and your life is useless without it!"

It is Apple's style to some extent--which is why they released a smartphone without copy/paste, multitasking, picture messaging, or 3G. And also why they released an MP3 player with no wifi and less space than a Nomad.

ADDED: When you're Apple, it's true you can't really afford a classic MVP. That doesn't mean perfectionism, it means that although you release something limited, you add in something great that's never been done before. The iPhone was the first phone with a multitouch interface. Plenty of people are willing to overlook not having picture messaging, or 3G, or third party apps for something that great. But you have to do something awesome and new--you can't just rehash the rest of the market.

So what's awesome and new in Ping that's never been done before?

Nothing, which is why it sucks.

They're already way late to the market with a music social network. IMO they should have got it right from the get-go. Startup rules are also different than giant corporation with bundles of cash. With built-in market-share for conversion, they missed an opportunity to impress the tech savvy and early adopters.

Was trying to think of this last night -- has giant company with scads of cash successfully "cold started" a social network in the past?

Let me ask my friends on Buzz...

I'm not sure if they qualify, but what about the gaming networks? Xbox Live and PSN are more content delivery, perhaps battle.net and Steam though?

What I would guess is that with Apple making deals with the major labels and positioning itself as the outlet for the consumption of mainstream music, it needs avoid anything that implies an "edge", which seems to be just about everything in the end; The music someone plays can just easily become a controversial statement as the text they post, maybe more easily.

Could you post some links to music that is 'controversial'?

Privacy advocates would be screaming bloody murder if Ping automatically scrobbled. Apple wanted to avoid waking that beast.

No permission. It would be pretty evil to secretly keep track of iTunes users and then secretly reveal a social network based on that.

They could use Genius data... which then makes me wonder why they didn't.

Next week on Daring Fireball: Why Ping is much smarter than you think and will prove the naysayers wrong.

Actually, if you're into cool, trendier, up-and-coming, non-mainstream music, Ping is pretty fantastic. The first recommended follow for me was Alexandra Patsavas who is the christener of cool when it comes to indie music. Ping got it spot on. I have no more need for using MySpace. I hate to brand all the naysayers wrong, but frankly they don't seem to share the same musical tastes as I do. I'd like to think I have pretty damn good taste, better than the naysayers :)

The naysayers seem to have wanted a Facebook replacement. I hate FB. Ping is a nice domain-specific social network. It serves a purpose, like LinkedIn. And I quite like it.

> if you're into cool, trendier, up-and-coming, non-mainstream music

> I'd like to think I have pretty damn good taste, better than the naysayers :)

You listen to indie rock and use a Windows or OSX operating system, what could be more mainstream. Spare us the narcissism and let me know when iTunes is on Ubuntu and minimal techno is a genre choice.

Niche social networks are great, but I think the obvious comparison is Last.fm . No one is comparing it to FaceBook or MySpace.

I think the point is that it should be fantastic for everyone regardless of what or how they listen. It's sitting there managing your music collection, it supplies genius recommendations based on it for goodness sake, a goldmine of data there for the taking. Yet because they've so heavily tilted it towards being an add-on to their shop (more Amazon than Facebook) it's a barren and unwelcoming prospect for anyone who doesn't already live inside the iTunes store bubble.

Maybe that's intentional, if you're not buying then maybe they don't want you in their social network. It's just a bit odd as every other social network is rabidly gathering users and putting off finding a business model till after it hits critical mass.

Also, a social network that only lets people in who have "good" taste would wither pretty quickly due to their limited numbers and wouldn't be financially supportable by Apple. A social network that only worked for people who get their music recommendations from the O.C. and Gossip Girl soundtracks on the other hand might just be some new circle of hell.

It should be fantastic to its market, which it is. Everyone is not a market.

"The first recommended follow for me was Alexandra Patsavas"

She's the first recommended follow for everyone.

Surprised how many people have failed to work this out - the "recommendations" are the same for everyone. There are basically 12 artist profiles in the whole system.

It's pretty obvious when you watch the keynote, and realize that the list of recommended artists are all ones that Jobs flashed for a few seconds while diddling around in "his" library in each product demo.

> Actually, if you're into cool, trendier, up-and-coming, non-mainstream music, Ping is pretty fantastic.

No. Really, no it's not.

> the christener of cool when it comes to indie music

Off-topic: the idea that indie music needs a professional gatekeeper seems ... contrary.

Just like everything else hipsters enjoy, indie music is "ironic".

How can something be cool and trendy while also being obscure and not mainstream? Don't "cool" and "trendy" imply prestige and popularity?

No. Cool and trendy mean that something is on the path to being mainstream. When it does hit mainstream, it's passé. :-)

Lol,

"Cool" and "hip" once meant stuff too groovy for the squares to dig. But that was well in the past now...

I can't tell whether you're trying to subtly troll hipsters here or if you really feel validated by Ping, and are smug about liking the kind of music which Alexandra Patsavas decides will be enjoyable to middle America.

Wait, down-voted you before I realized the parody...

You don't get it. Ping is only there to drive up music sales. This is why every single page has Buy buttons. And why the focus is mostly on music from the store and not for example your ripped music is scrobbled.

This is not about music fans. This is a controlled environment to sell more music.

Sure, but to sell music you need to sell it to fans. You can't just make a page with a buy button on it, call it a social network and expect it to increase revenue.

Either Apple have something up their sleeve or they're being terribly naive.

I think if you're Apple, you probably could create a blank page with a Buy button to increase revenue.

He does get it, you don't. Apple needs to actually make a useful product if they want to sell music through Ping. This miserable turd they have forced out is unbelievably bad and will not drive up music sales at all. Instead, it's bringing the sanity of a respected company into question.

I "got" the reasons why Apple didn't integrate with the leading rival social networks.

But bearing in mind they've got their own piece of software that'll tell them everything you listen to (and how often) and a library full of albums for sale by those artists, any halfway competent product manager would have made recommending albums by these artists their absolute #1 priority. Complete with big "buy" button.

Judging by the authors screenshots and lists of bands it sounds like they've released with the Cuil of music recommendation engines.

For a company whose attention to detail is legendary, that's embarrassing.

My experience with recommendation engines (mainly Pandora) is that they're not yet good enough for rabid fans, connoisseurs, and musicians. You get bands that are trying to be like some great band, but not quite doing it. What you're left with is a bunch of imitators that you don't want to listen to, which results in hearing music that makes you sick of the one band you did like in the first place.

It really depends on the type of recommendation engine being used. Pandora tries to match by sound - matching similar sounding works. Other engines rely on people and the relationships that are formed based on what everybody likes. The problem with these recommendation engines is that new music (in this case) really need to be seeded first before they'll start showing up in lists.

Yep, the fact that it's only interested in my iTunes Store-bought music makes it utterly useless to me. I still like CDs, and when I go for MP3s instead iTunes is rarely the best deal.

Do they think Ping's going to persuade me to pay over the odds for digital music and give up on CDs??

I'd say they expect that at least some people will. If Ping were to take off (in the modest sense of people actually activating it and occasionally looking at it), I would expect it to drive up iTunes sales. I don't like that it would drive up sales, but I expect it would happen.

Unfortunate fact is, there are a lot of people out there (I'd say most of us, but to varying degrees) whose music taste is largely influenced by what they think it says about them to others. Music as a status symbol. And status symbols work even better when it's less apparent that you're actively trying to signal.

So if my stream updated automatically that I'd just listened to the new Arcade Fire album, problem solved. But if it doesn't, and I want to impress people by showing that I listen to it, and there's no way to do that on Ping except by buying it from iTunes... I think that would have an effect on a lot of people's judgement. Most of the time not enough to send you over the edge, but on an aggregate scale, often enough to bump up sales.

Again though, this is contingent on Ping taking off as a tool people actually use for music networking. If no one's looking, no one cares what they look like.

> But if it doesn't, and I want to impress people by showing that I listen to it, and there's no way to do that on Ping except by buying it from iTunes.

Actually, there is. In my opinion it is a very bad way to do so, but you browse on the ITMS to the music you want, click on the down arrow and click on Post. Then you can add a message and it will be appear on your Profile.

But as I said in my comment[1], they should have made all that accessible from within my library!

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1659902

Keeping this in mind makes me extremely grateful that it's only in ITMS and not in my library. I don't want or need another social network, least of all one welded onto my personal music collection.

Which is a win in my mind. I'm always out to find good music that isn't on the top 100 list. Connecting with people in an environment like this is great.

People make this out to be such a poor decision on their part, but it's incredibly convenient. Give it some more time and we'll see improvements.

While trying to avoid the cliche "Apple sux" explanation, I'm actually genuinely surprised they botched this as badly as they seem to have.

Maybe it's releasing a product without a comprehensive music database being in place. Maybe it's the inability to link to, you know, their OWN PRODUCT a la last.fm and, well, anything.

But really, whoever was in charge of this obviously wasn't being watched closely enough - this is a software foul-up of pretty large proportions.

Plus I like the implication that they don't trust any other form of avatar/username site (Gravatar, etc) and instead you have to take your picture with your cute widdle iCameraAsApprovedByApple and then wait for it to be "approved."

Which makes me feel immensely sorry for anyone whose job encompasses looking to see if pictures violate a ToS agreement, even if it is 10 minutes a day, and even if it is "pre-filtered" by some type of algorithm (surely, please for the love of all things surely).

Overall, depressing.

Apple's controlling nature, and desire to be the Disney of the computer world, seem incompatible with the instincts needed to create a successful social network.

You've nailed it. All the things that make Apple's business model advantageous – the meticulous scripting, the secrecy, the glossed-over experience – work wonders on hardware. But when it comes to social networks, it's clear that they just don't understand the model at all. Because they can't do ANY of these things and have a successful social network.

This was roughly my thought too. A social network that will only ever be available to a small niche (iTunes users that purchase music on the ITMS) is hardly social. Last.fm is available to anyone regardless of their platform or where they got their music, with the obvious caveat that they need a plugin for their music player.

I was still thinking of giving some credit to Ping when I saw, after being disappointed with all the other features, that you could post a music to your profile. That's something that I quite regularly do on my Facebook profile, simply post a youtube video of some music I like so I can share it with my friends.

I quickly went back to my library, right clicked on a song and searched for some Post button. Unfortunately, as I was soon able to find out, you can only do that inside the ITMS. Of course, some of the songs I have on my library are not in the ITMS, but they could still figure out an automatic way of matching the artist and track name, ask me if one of the matched songs is the one I'm talking about and post it.

As a result, Ping, instead of being that brilliant last.fm killer idea we all envisioned when we heard about it of bringing a music social network to the actual music player people use, is just a webpage poorly stamped to my music player, with absolutely no integration with my library.

Even Last.fm, a 3rd party social network has more integration with my library then a social network inside my music player. If this makes sense...

P.S.: what I said about Posting is equally applicable for Liking a song. You can't do that in your library and there is also no relation between your 5-star rated songs and the music you actually like according to ping.

> And I have no idea who Yo-Yo Ma and Jack Johnson even are.

oooookay.

Yeah, this guy not knowing who one of the most skilled cellists on the planet is kinda undermines any of his music-related credibility.

And that's worse than Ping not knowing who The Doors are?

Well, the thing is that you could follow The Doors all you want, you wouldn't be informed of new albums, new concerts or new posts from the band any time soon. I'm not exactly surprised it's not there.

Or more probably the artist pages are created by the artists.

or by labels

The fact that people like him aren't on this social network is why I think it will take off. A music-based social network needs people who, you know, are kind of into music.

Look at the 3 genres of music he chose, then look at the suggestions. Just try and justify Yo-Yo Ma. Don't get me wrong, I love his work, it's just that the blogger here didn't choose classical.

Because we all like the same music.....

I don't like Jack Johnson but I know who he is. You'd have to be a pretty lazy music consumer to not know who he is, the kind that doesn't buy music but just listens to ClearChannel stations. Otherwise known as the kind of people that Apple doesn't want on the social network because they won't buy music and aren't much interested in it either.

I disagree. The compelling reason Apple would enter the social space was to inform their customers about artists they don't already know about. To contend that Apple isn't interested in the ClearChannel listener is exactly wrong. In Apple's ideal world, ClearChannel doesn't even have a reason to exist. Their goal should be to expose artists and music that their customers haven't already heard about, in order to encourage them to buy their music.

I'm not sure he needs any "music-related credibility" (whatever that is) to make valid points about Ping. I'm pretty sure all he needs to make valid criticisms of Ping is:

1. iTunes (check) 2. the desire to use a music-oriented social network (http://www.last.fm/user/swizec - check, I think)

The only thing I can think of that might disqualify him from having, uh, cred here is that he already has a last.fm - I bet Ping catches on best, if it remains as it is now, with people who haven't sought out a music/social network, but see Ping in their iTunes, hassle-free, and decide it's pretty neat.

And nobody likes more than three genres of music.

oooookay. (there are 9 on that list I listen to weekly)

I'm dumbfounded that they're using iTunes as the platform for this thing. Not having it exist as a website is retarded beyond belief. I really hope this isn't the fruit their Lala acquisition is bearing, because if it is it makes me even more angry that they killed one of my favorite web apps. They should have just rebranded lala as Apple Ping and been done with it. Huge fail so far.

Usually, Apple does a very good job of masking when a product is designed purely to sell other products. For example is iTunes or the iPod the razor blade? Ping is very sanitized and sterile. For the huge launch they did, there is almost no content preloaded. Plus there is even less freedom then in the app store.

For posterity, I'd like to record the following message:

These comments were all made when ping sucked. I'm sure that, similarly to the iPod launch, Apple will fix Ping and use it to destroy facebook. 10 years from now, all of these comments will look foolish.

Clearly Apple has gotten so good at making winning products they need a fresh and new challenge. They've set the bar very high for themselves.

I'll start off by saying that I personally will probably have little use for Ping. My musical tastes are fairly, shall we say, idiosyncratic.

Having said that, Ping seems to be a targeted product, aimed at a particular audience. It is a sales tool for music. If you fit the demographic it will probably work pretty well. My guess is that computer geeks (include me) are not the demographic Steve is aiming for. If you teenager, and listen to whatever 90% of teenagers listen to these days, then it might work quite well for you.

The product's success will not depend on how well people like the typical Hacker News reader like it...

Apple is like graphic artists back in the early days of the web. Only experienced in the controlled print environment, the web pages they designed was just images on static pages, but not web.

Anyone else get so annoyed by the flashing little dummy avatars at the bottom of the page that they couldn't finish the article? Shame too, I was liking it.

(is that an ad? or some kind of 'social feature'?? Something incredibly ironic about this article if the latter)

Explained here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1659814

What is that random bar of faceless people on the bottom of the article page?

It's LiveNetLife. They're trying to introduce live chatting features into random websites and I thought I'd give the service a try. Mostly because I personally know the founder.

Oh. Seems interesting... although the UI could use a little softening up. If there's one thing I agree with Steve Jobs about it's rounded corners.

It kept flickering constantly adding/removing 'people' and didn't really let me read anything on that page.

The biggest problem for me is finding artists and people to follow. Why can the Genius feature look at my library and suggest music to buy but in Ping I get 14 suggestions that are all unrelated? Ok, facebook and apple are sorting things out, but why do i have to enter email addresses? Why can't it look at my apple address book and at least let me pick from that? Very messy rollout and I can't help but think apple's secrecy and control is going to burn them here.

My one problem is in lieu of adding indy artists, I really wish Ping would replace the alerts subsystem so I could follow any artist. I finally figured out how to comment on albums and here is a link on how to like an individual song ( http://www.tuaw.com/2010/09/02/itunes-101-liking-a-song-in-p... ).

On the wish side: kill suggested follows, allow comments / like audiobooks, follow but do not display in profile artist (guilty pleasure).

>>Fail #4 - obviously commercially inspired music recommendations are obviously lametastic.

Is this the best critique of Ping HN could find, a poorly written, rage-infused, explitive-riddled rant fest that one would expect to be found on digg?

Ping came out 2 bloody days ago! Who would expect that every niche artist would be on this thing not even 48 hours in? I'm very impressed with the mix they got on board pre-launch. Give it a couple of days.

By the way, how many users did Myspace, FB, or Twitter have 2 days in? Let's use our heads here, folks.

Considering they've had the whole Genius recommendations in place for quite some time now, their complete failure at recommending relevant artists is pretty bad. I've heard numerous complaints that the recommended artists were nowhere near the user's taste.

That's likely because artists who are presently on board Ping represent 1% of 1% of all of the artist data that exist in Genius. If the recommendation engine is giving poor recommendations, it's probably because there is a lack of variety now, and also because it's still learning based on user behavior. Again, nothing that time can't solve.

Maybe it's just that they have set up the wrong expectations. I certainly didn't expect that artists would have to be _users_ of Ping. I thought they'd just sort of be there as, you know, artists.

The only one of these that bothers me at all is the dearth of artists on the network. But that alone is plenty fatal. I guess I'll try it again in a month and see how uptake is then.

I'd say it's extremely premature to say it will fail, though. But I guess tech pundits love to jump to conclusions based on opening day impressions.

Here is why ping will fail:

I heard about it a couple of days ago, but never really gave it much thought because, honestly, I don't really even know what it is for. Streaming music? Better than grooveshark? Not likely if its run by Apple.

After seeing this article (and the one directly below it as of right now), I decided I should check it out.

Hmmm...do I go to ping.com (no, because I'm pretty sure that ping golf clubs aren't going to sell their domain), or apple.com/ping? No, that says "the page you're looking for cannot be found".

Okay, then, duckduckgo it is! Hmm...apple.com/itunes/ping, that is a lot to type...stupid move, apple, whatever.

click

Annnndddd...nothing? I have to launch iTunes to even see what this is?

iTunes, right, the software that won't let me play half of my audio files because Apple refuses to allow flac?

So I have to get out my laptop, open it, launch itunes, then figure out how to get to ping?

The barrier to entry, at least for me, is way to high.

Well, that's nice, but they're not targeting you. They're targeting the millions of people that listen to music through iTunes everyday which are likely wondering what their friends are listening to. If you don't use their product, or have very little desire to in the first place, it doesn't qualify as a failure.

This article disappointed me. I was expecting a good hacker's rant about /sbin/ping.

Exactly :). One nice Slashdot comment:

"That's gonna be awesome for internet help-desk workers. How about creating a Flickr clone and calling it ifconfig?" (Steauengeglase)

Just goes to show how out of the loop I am when it comes to Apple. I read the title, wondered if it was about the internet echo test command, and then wondered, how the heck would they screw THAT up??!

That the author more or less admits to confirmation bias in the very first paragraph kind of colors their conclusions, regardless of whether Ping actually sucks or not.

the really disappointing thing about ping is that unlike last.fm, apple has access to the binary file for itunes and so could provide even more info about your listening habits.

I assume last.fm's scrobbler works entirely from the unencrypted itunes file which only gives play count.

An inflammatory jackass who doesn't know who Yo-Yo Ma is and who thinks Apple would ever consider Gravatar support gets this much interest on news.ycomb? And did you notice it's a self-submit? Classy.

Lately it seems like this discussion group has become increasingly anti-Apple. It didn't use to be this way, originally it was far more neutral. I wonder what's changed?

> Lately it seems like this discussion group has become increasingly anti-Apple. It didn't use to be this way, originally it was far more neutral. I wonder what's changed?

HN is frequented by developers. Probably, the increased hostility is at least partly a reaction to Apple's iOS App Store policies.

Really? Is there that much ire? Why don't they get over it and dev for android?

So Ping won't be available outside of the U.S.? Well, thank f*+k for that!

Huh? I am using Ping without any problems from the Netherlands, with a Dutch iTunes account.

Stopped reading when he said he didn't know Yo-Yo Ma.

I don't know why Apple thought anybody wanted this.

Yeah, well... so is Facebook, so is Twitter, so is Windows, so is pretty much everything. Who cares.

your itunes account is "hacked"? pimped out, is it? is it lowered too? hellaflush.

no, ping is not very useful right now. I'm sure they'll figure out how to improve it. apple frequently starts with a small wedge and then innovates on top of it.

It is worth noting that said "small wedge" has (historically) been a good small wedge. The point is, people seem unconvinced of the magicality or revolutionariness of this particular wedge.

people are frequently unconvinced of a lot of things. and that's a good thing. its the fundamental principle of science.

its the reaction and tone that bother me, not the content.

So, that settles it: No scrobbling. Less artists than last.fm. Lame. [1]

Looks like ping is another home run.

[1]With all apologies to Rob Malda: http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23/1816257

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