Seth Rubenstein

Apple, I think I can safely say, shocked everyone with the launch of Ping this past week. I myself jumped at the opportunity to try it out and now that I’ve had 24 hours to play with it I’ve got some thoughts.

First; MySpace is screwed. There was only one thing that MySpace had going for it the music scene it’s something Facebook never really dived into and so there was plenty of room for someone to come in and do it right. MySpace has been limping along for the past few years adding features that are far from well thought out, well designed, and easy to use the perfect atmosphere for Apple to create a solution. And that’s what Ping really is. I’d have to disagree with Steve Job’s assessment that Ping is a cross between Facebook and Twitter; no it’s a cross between the music aspects of MySpace and the UI and verbage of Facebook. It’s a winning combo.

Second; Ping has alot of room to grow. As it stands the features of Ping are bare bones at best. You can like a song, you can post comments, and you can see what your friends or bands that you follow are buying. I think Ping would be 100x better with a scrobbling service ala Last.fm; so instead of just seeing what my friends are buying I can see what they’re actually listening to.

Lastly; Apple screwed the pooch on design on this one. iTunes 10 is ugly let’s just get that out of the also while I’m at it do yourself a favor and add some color back to iTunes 10 by download this. And Ping could look a bit better.

All in all it’s a good start and with Apple’s clout this could be huge. Right now there just aren’t enough of my favorite bands (Dropkick Murphy’s, The XX, Spoon) on there yet to get that same MySpace effect but once they do… BAM watch out Fox Interactive