When Apple introduced Ping, their “music social network”, back in September 2010 you could hear a yelp of excitement from the Apple fanboys who want everything to be run by their fruity overlord, and a collective sigh of frustration by the rest of the technology sector. Apple is a very successful hardware and services company that is very much a closed ecosystem, and social cannot work with closed systems. Apple wanted iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad users to be able to share their musical tastes, loves, and hates with each other, and follow their favourite artists – bringing the whole musical conversation within the Apple ecosystem. But people already had all their friends on Facebook and could follow their favourite bands and artists on Twitter – so Ping has never taken off.
Apple are not the only technology company that has failed at social – Murdoch’s News Corporation famously destroyed MySpace, AOL killed Bebo, and Google had the disaster that was Buzz (and some would argue Google+ isn’t doing much better). But for Apple, a company that has seen huge success after success, to see Ping never even make a dent must have been a shock. Apple is so successful as a company because all of its business are built around sales of hardware, software, and content – but people simply do not want a social network built around commerce. No-one has found a way to mix social and commerce in any meaningful way as of yet.
It is good, however, that the company has realised its mistake and decided to close down Ping rather than leaving the unused bloatware in all of its products. Now they have deep integration with Facebook and Twitter coming in iOS6, there really is no reason that anyone would want to share information into the Ping deadspace – so it is being removed before iOS6 is released to the world (it is currently in the iOS6 beta but doesn’t work).