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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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.