What Apple did Wrong!

Steve Jobs presenting Keynote for iTunes Ping
November of 2009.

Well Ive been gone for a long time, but today i want to talk about something that Apple totally did wrong. What Apple did was so bad, an absolute blunder that it is reminds me of mobileme, another monumental failure by Apple. Now dont get me wrong, i am a huge supporter of Apple and have far more good things to say about them, but in this case they have left me scratchin' the ol' noggin.

What I've been getting at is iTunes Ping, or in Apple World simply known as Ping. The other day I was on iTunes and I saw ping. For a minute, I had to remember what it was and the last time I used it. What it is supposed to be is Apple's version of a music social media, something MySpace did right in its hayday and still does a nice job at today. However, there are several shortcomings that make me shake my head and leave me wondering what the heck Apple was thinking when they released it. Here are a few bulleted points of things that 100% suck about ping.

• No actual website. This is bad because to get someone to find and add me, the process is slow, confusing, and annoying and is not as simple as just giving them the url, so I dont bother. Not the adjectives I usually use to describe a company that pushes the slogan "It just works."
• The profiles themselves are terrible. For the most part, I can upload one picture of myself, and share just 3 genres of music i like (which i like FAR more than that) and I can list some music I bought. Yeah, nothing that is overwhelming and rather actually underwhelming
• You cant send messages, chat, or start groups. After saying all that, why would i want to use this social media? Its isolated, primative, ugly, boring, and pointless. By far, this is the worst attempt to create something in Apples long and historic run of success.

After all this negativity AppleGuesser, surely there is something Ping does right. Yeah, sure it does SOMETHING right, what is it? I sure dont know. Honestly, I have used Ping for all of 10 minutes, and that was mostly used to set the profile up. Now if Apple wants to make this thing really fly, they could and can do it, here is how:

1. Add the Find My Friends to Ping, almost like a check in for Facebook. Make it intuitive for finding friends.
2. Ok Apple, I know you may cringe at the thought of incorporating Facebook to your Social Network. But please, do it. That way I can find friends, post music ive been listening to or bought to my news feed, much like instagram works. 
3. Make it a website I can access easily from anywhere, not just iTunes. By having it in iTunes, you isolate the Social Network. By having it on the net, I can add friends more easily VIA a simple url and vise versa. 
4. And lastly, make this a dedicated default app and built it through iOS 6. Stop using twitter as your cover up Social Networking creator. You have your own, use it man!

Ok, so those are somethings that have been gnawing at me for quite sometime. What do you guys think? Do you actually use Ping at all? Am I just trying to make a tin can fly in the air? Who knows, but i do know that if Apple tried even a little bit to make this work, they could make it work. Anyways, Peace people, take it easy, enjoy that last day of April, and Happy Monday! AppleGuesser OUT!!!!