Jason Smith • Reasons Why Ping Is Useless

Reasons Why Ping Is Useless

This is a quick review of the Ping service that iTunes launched

iTunes has plenty of information about what I listen to and what I buy, and yet there are no recommendations from the start. Even their lame genius feature in the store attempts to do this.
Finding people isn’t tied to twitter or facebook, but emails addresses. So, I’ll never try to find anyone.
The artists you can follow are lame. I’m not interested in them, and I already don’t follow facebook pages because I find the updates to be inane usually. I am interested in these people because of the art they create, not their photos of them on tour. Unless you’re Tom Waits. I’ll follow him on any network.
There is also no artist sign up so local/small bands won’t be on it. This will not aid in music discovery, or bringing smaller artists recognition. What a waste of an opportunity.
It is completely tied to iTunes, and what if you listen to music they don’t sell? Then you have no way of sharing that with your friends.

^{*All of the above opinions are subject to change based on user adoption, and improvements to the service Apple makes, but it looks like I will continue to use last.fm and just asking my friends in person about music.}