Outlook Press: iTunes Ping: The Invention of Facebook . . . . . . . . . Again

October 12, 2010

iTunes Ping: The Invention of Facebook . . . . . . . . . Again

By: Erin O’Brien

Outlook Press
“If you were the inventors of Facebook, you would have invented Facebook.”  The words of Jesse Eisenberg as Mark Zuckerberg, the inventor of Facebook, in Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Network, could have just as easily been said to Apple in reference to Ping as to the classmates that sued him for theft of intellectual property.  

Ping, which has supposedly acquired one million users in the first 48 hours, according to Apple, is eerily similar in both function and format to Zuckerberg’s Facebook.  The only visible difference between the two social networking sites is that Ping is limited itself to being only music.   

            

 The similarities are even more apparent when looking at Facebook’s Music application, formerly iLike.  The Music application is an almost identical program to iTunes ping, but was developed four years prior. 

             

Besides being one of the most high-tech examples of plagiarism, Ping is nowhere near as popular as it claimed to be.  Having only one million users after the first month is amazing but less so when you take into account that this was the number of members Apple reported after just two days. 

Whether this number is accurate or, more likely, exaggerated is up for debate, as Apple is the only source that has released the numbers yet.  The lack of growth does not bode well for the future of the “budding” network.  

The disinterest may be the least of Ping’s worries given the numerous technical issues they have experienced since inception.  Within 24 hours of Ping’s launch the network was overloaded with spam, mostly for free iPhones and iPads, from hackers due to the system’s weak firewalls. The first 'free iPhone' spam wave remained active for up to four hours before being disabled.  

The problems just kept getting worse for Ping as reports flooded in of fake artist pages being posted.  Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos pointed out the design flaws of the network saying, “clearly the lack of filtering on Ping is making it a brand new playground for [scammers] to operate in.”   

Ping’s record also includes many failed and unauthorized attempts to integrate themselves with Facebook, which were foiled when Facebook issued a block to deny access to their system’s application programming interface (API) needed to link the two websites.   A connection between Facebook and any other website requires a contract that clearly lays out the terms of use, something Facebook has repeatedly refused to do with Ping.   

The bad press and network issues may require a major Ping re-vamp in the near future.  It’s safe to say Ping does not live up to it's hype.