Ping - What is it good for?

Apple released the latest version of iTunes, version 10, to much media hype yesterday. One of the major changes is a new feature called Ping. A social network of sorts, it's like Last.fm but built into iTunes, with hints of Twitter and Facebook about it. You can follow bands or other users, post reviews and look at charts. It's social media, but focussed around the music in the iTunes music store.

At least, that's the intention. I was actually quite excited about it at first, but the reality soon put a damper on it. Many little issues that cropped up during the configuration of my profile that just irked me somewhat.

The first is quite simple; you can only use your iTunes account. So I can have one, and 23inertia can have one, but TME cannot. This is very much unlike Twitter which is pretty much a free-for-all as long as you can keep track of all the accounts you have.

So that aside, I figured I'd just set up my account like I have for Last.fm. I barely use any of the social aspects of Last.fm, if I'm honest. I'm friends with 4 people and use it primarily to track my music listening habits and get new recommendations. I figure that if I can duplicate that functionality then I'm all good.

Unfortunately the parallels with Last.fm fall very short. There is no scrobbling, for instance, or anything like it. In fact, Ping seems entirely unaware of the existence of my music collection despite being in the very same iTunes library. It doesn't use it for recommendations, for populating the "music I like" box, or anything else. And simply listening to songs doesn't make them show up either. I have to purchase, follow or review the album for it to make an appearance. In the end I simply used my Last.fm top 10 artists to manually populate my profile. That I had to use an external service to get that information, despite iTunes holding my play counts, is not a good sign.

So plodding along with the profile creation, I get to set a photo. So far, so ordinary. Except when I chose my photo, it informed me that it had to be approved before it will show up. What's this? The lock-down control extends as far as how you look now? This is getting worse ...

And so the final nail in the coffin for the Ping profile configuration; genre selection. You are allowed to choose a maximum of 3 genres that match your musical tastes. Never mind that my collection spans dozens. I have to limit myself. Uncle Steve said so.

Fair enough, I shall do that. Alternative, Metal, Rock. Sounds like a good combo and relatively representative of my general tastes. And this is where it all goes horribly wrong. There is no way to select metal as one of your three. At all. It simply doesn't exist.

And so here I am. The metal being forcefully stripped from my persona, I am forced to live as an alt-rock goon with no profile picture. Time to follow some bands, I suppose. Let's do a search.

• Dark Tranquillity - No results found.
• Lacuna Coil - No results found.
• Arcade Fire - No results found.
• Nightwish - No results found.
• The Gathering - No results found.
• Lady Gaga - Aha! Here we go!

Except, no. I don't listen to Lady Gaga. But she is my top recommendation. Remember what I said about it ignoring my music library? And no other artist I have yet searched for has a profile I can follow.

Maybe all this will improve in time as more people and artists sign up to it. Unfortunately, though, I fear that it may never encompass my primary interests. I'll leave my profile dormant for a bit and see if anything more exciting than Katy Perry pops up on the recommendations. Otherwise, I really can't see the point.