Taking 5: Ping

You’ve seen it. You have access to it. And you’ve used it (maybe). Well, I’ve used it, or tried anyway.
Ariel Waldman said on her tiwtter:
I kept an open mind for a couple days, but now I feel confident in saying that Ping is really not well thought out on multiple fronts.
And on this week’s Engadget podcasat Josh Topolsky said:
Imagine if Facebook started right now and you were aware of it. Like, 500 million people knew what Facebook was and they launched it, like, today.
I think that is the best way to describe it. It’s this huge system and framework with no content. It’s almost the way I would describe Places as compared to Foursquare. And I tried, really. I did. Before I wrote this… review(?)… of the service I wanted to do everything that you could do.
I found friends, I followed artists, I liked a bunch of albums and even wrote a review. The problem is, I couldn’t really find enough people to follow. Because it’s so new some of my favorite artists aren’t on there or my friends who have good taste in music aren’t on there because (a) they don’t use the iTunes Store to buy music because of services like Emusic (b) they have a large libraries of music and therefore already have ways of discovering new artists.
Now if you are on an album page in iTunes, it will tell you which of your friends have also purchased that album. Which is cool, but it’s mining that data from your iTunes purchase history and doesn’t let you mark which albums you’ve have purchased from other services, or uploaded from CD’s… the way you had to do it before 2004.
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