Walled Gardens of Ping

If Ping, Apple’s new music social network, is a raging success then I’ll eat my hat. It might survive as a niche for those who live all their lives within the Apple ecosystem but I seriously doubt it’ll be adopted by a significant number of the 160 million iTunes users cited by Steve Jobs.

This isn’t because it’s a bad thing. It looks like a decent mix of Last.FM and Facebook neatly integrated into people’s music listening systems. The problem I’m seeing is that’s about it. It’s a functional thing that doesn’t appear to do much else.

Now, I’m aware that I’m judging this after playing with it for 30 seconds and that it took about 6 months for me to figure out what Twitter was for. But I now know what Twitter is for – it’s not for anything. Same with Facebook – ostensibly it’s to “connect and share with the people in your life” which is as vague as vague can be.

When a platform is for nothing in particular then it’s for everything you can think of. It seems to me that either your good at a niche activity or you’re good at integrating an abundance of niche activities. You can’t be both.

But all that aside this was the blast from the past that showed me Ping wasn’t there.

There are many ways this could work. At it’s most basic an integration into the OSX address book would be handy but that’s just a shortcut. More useful would be some kind of integration into Twitter or Facebook accounts, not to post annoying “@peteashton has just listened to Lady Gaga!” messages but to find out what my actual social network is listening to. These are the people I’ve built a relationship with and whose music tastes I don’t have access to. Smurshing these two datasets together would be awesome.

But no, Apple isn’t going to do that anytime soon. They need to own it all.

The approach to Ping is similar to Apple’s approach to Adobe Flash. They don’t like it because they don’t control it. Here’s Steve Jobs (quoted by John Gruber) from his notorious “Thoughts on Flash.”

We know from painful experience that letting a third party layer of software come between the platform and the developer ultimately results in sub-standard apps and hinders the enhancement and progress of the platform. If developers grow dependent on third party development libraries and tools, they can only take advantage of platform enhancements if and when the third party chooses to adopt the new features. We cannot be at the mercy of a third party deciding if and when they will make our enhancements available to our developers.

Let’s say Ping is integrated into Twitter and Facebook and some other social networks in a useful and interesting way. And then let’s say Twitter goes bankrupt or Facebook radically changes how it works without any warning. Ping is suddenly missing some seriously important vital organs and there’s nothing Apple can do about it. Twitter and Facebook don’t care what happens to Ping – only Apple does.

This might be a silly approach to building a social app in this era of interoperability but it fits with Apple’s culture. Either they can control it or they don’t want anything to do with it because if it breaks they’ll get the blame. (You can see this happen when Twitter flakes out and people blame Tweetdeck or some other 3rd party client for being rubbish instead of the source.)

I can sympathise with Apple’s position here. Latching on to Facebook or Twitter’s infrastructure is a risky proposition because they are closed platforms out of your control. If social networks were run on open standards then I’m sure Apple would be right in there just as they are with HTML5 over Flash. Their mantra is either we control it or no-one controls it and it’s a healthy attitude. Unfortunately the social Internet hasn’t matured to that state yet.