On September 30, iTunes Ping, Apple’s music-oriented social network and recommendation service, is officially shutting down. This announcement comes just two years after the network was introduced.
Ping allowed users to follow and receive updates from both friends and specific artists, and was accessible through both iTunes and the iPhone.
Many are saying that one of the major blocks to Ping’s success had to do with its lack of Facebook integration. During the initial announcement of Ping, the late Apple CEO Steve Jobs gave a demo of the social networking site, including its Facebook integration. Shortly after Ping’s release, users began to report that Facebook’s social integration had been removed.
More recently, at the D10 conference in June, current Apple CEO Time Cook hinted that Ping may soon be a thing of the past, saying, “We tried Ping, and I think the customer voted and said ‘This isn’t something that I want to put a lot of energy into.’”
Does this mean that Apple has given up on social media? Not quite. Apple has worked to heavily integrate Twitter into iOS and Mac OS X, as well as integrating Facebook into iOS 6. Although there does not appear to be any new social network on the horizon for Apple, it does seem that they are still interested in making current social networking sites easily accessible for Mac users.