When Apple Pings, millions respond
Apple has stepped into the social networking marketplace with their Ping network and are already signing up large numbers of new members. The music-oriented service already has a million members.
Apple’s new Ping social network has gotten off with a bang, as does everything that Apple decides to do, it seems. They announced their new idea just a few days ago and there have already been over a million people sign up in the first couple of days. Eddy Cue, Apple’s vice president of Internet Services, said “One-third of the people who have downloaded iTunes 10 have joined Ping. As many more people download iTunes 10 in the coming weeks, we expect the Ping community to continue growing.”
Since there are 160 million iTunes users, it is likely that Cue’s prediction makes more than just a small amount of sense. The one million that have joined to date are truly a drop in the bucket when compared to the 500 million users of Facebook and the 145 million Twitter members, but a million users in two days is not to be sneezed at. An Independent story notes that there are 40 million members at a similar site, Last.fm, and one should expect Apple to do at least as well. Steve Jobs said “you can follow your favorite artists and friends and join a worldwide conversation with music’s most passionate fans.”
Not everyone thinks that Apple has the right idea yet. Business Insider’s Jay Yarow said, speaking of Ping, “It is fundamentally flawed because it doesn’t interact with your iTunes music collection. Without the ability to actually to actually [sic] tell our friends what we’re listening to, Ping is a pretty useless service.” That may be going a bit far, Jay. I’ll pit Steve Jobs’ record against yours any day. Still, only time will tell if the people that produced the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad can deliver the goods in the social networking field.
