Ping!

10 years ago, Apple tried their hand at social…

First and foremost, it was an awful name. Ping? It was a name so generic so as to sound like nothing at all. And when you consider that Apple had to pay the golf equipment company for the rights to use it — at least there, “ping” makes sense as a sound of a club hitting a ball, I guess — it makes even less sense. Steve Jobs was usually pretty good at this stuff, to say the least! But Ping was a huge branding fail.

Today marks 10 years since the service was unveiled on stage by Jobs during an iPod event — remember when Apple still had iPod-focused events? — in San Francisco. I was there in the audience that day, but I barely remember it. Though Techmeme helpfully reminds me that I wrote quite a few articles about Ping. As did a whole fun cast of characters.

It was a big deal. Apple was entering “social” for the first time. This was “Facebook and Twitter meet iTunes,” Jobs noted. “But it’s not Facebook, it’s not Twitter; it’s a social network all about music.” And it would have 160 million users right out of the gate, as Jobs touted. Because that’s the number of iTunes users there were (in the 23 countries Ping would operate in). iTunes 10! Again, huge.

Two years later, Ping was dead.

It was a pretty humiliating defeat for Apple. Except that no one really cared because basically from day one, no one actually used Ping. It was one of those things that may have made sense on paper — you can follow your favorite artists,¹ and your friends,² in the most popular music player in the world! But in practice, it was just a total dud.

Interestingly enough, it also showcased some hiccups Apple was having with Facebook. Which became burps. Which have become violent stomach ailments. “Onerous terms” go both ways, it seems.

¹ Apple would try again with “Connect” in Apple Music. But, nah.

² This still lives on in Apple Music, of course.