In September, Apple introduced a new social network called Ping.But this one differs from others; it’s a social network for music! Steve Jobs says: “It’s like Facebook and Twitter meet ITunes but it’s not Facebook and it’s not Twitter”. It has 160 million users in 23 countries built in right away. Surely, others will follow during the year. On ping, you can follow your favorite singers, upload your songs and also follow your friends and discuss with them about music. It’s for Apple a way to discover new music. Plus, there more than 17,000 concert listing in the network.

Apple had announced a partnership with Facebook to be easily linked to ping. But when you go on the ping’s home page, you find nowhere how to be connected thanks to Facebook, only the possibility of finding your friends by email. Trickiest still it’s necessary to download the Apple application, ITunes 10. The reason of this missed partnership differs.
For Jobs, it would be due to «onerous terms» asked by facebook, but this one didn’t specify how much. For facebook it’s an incompatibility of purposes, indeed, if you want to create a facebook account you only need an email address, to create a ping account, you need a credit card. Facebook purpose is to link up people between them and create a community; Ping aim is simply across the discovery of new artists, the purchase of new songs.

Besides his antisocial behaviour, ping isn’t completely finished. For instance, it’s impossible to find his friends or artists known or even worse there isn’t status update; actually it isn’t therefore possible to show what I’m listening to. In spite of the link between ITunes and ping, this one doesn’t care about my last titles listened or bought to suggest me pages. He doesn’t therefore have interest in it to download ITunes 10, if it is not to show it others than I bought. It would indeed be cleverer to show music that I listen and so finding out my contacts directly.
By many points, Ping has a lot of delay, and didn’t fit to today's web formalities. It is not possible for example to listen songs entirely but only 30 seconds. In addition, I can discuss with nobody and ping doesn’t turn under linux but only thanks to ITunes 10.
To put it simply, this new social network was practically doomed to failure before is lauching so much the Apple philosophy is in conflict with the idea of a social network. Apple works in a closed-loop with his own hardware, software and devices that it goes contrary to the opening which offer by Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and others... Ping even entered in the top 10 of 2010 Internet flop.