A: When you do, please follow me on Ping.
Ping, for all intents and purposes, sucks right now.
I don't buy music anymore from the iTunes Music Store. Give me Amazon any day of the week and twice on the first day of the month when they unveil their list of $5 albums!
A friend instantly described Ping as having "the potential to be extremely awesome or annoying." That pretty much sums up the new music-based social networking that Apple introduced with it's newest iTunes software update.
If you are one that likes to catch me in a hypocrisy, you must be smiling because I've long held the belief of only maintaining one social network profile at a time. Let's just say that I'm putting minimal effort into whatever Ping is offering because they aren't offering much.
You can "follow" both Music makers and Music purchasers. The ever awesome Lincoln Hall (a concert venue that can do no wrong as far as I'm concerned) posted for people to follow them on Ping. Less than ten minutes later I was signed up and following. Sadly, Lincoln Hall (at the time) was the only "follow-worthy" entity on Ping. Seems like Apple only gave advance notice to the Gagas, Perrys, and Coldplays of the world. The first two bands I searched to follow, Radiohead and Broken Social Scene, weren't on there.
The one cool thing was an exercise I went through during the sign up process. Ping wanted me to list ten songs I "liked" to give others a sense of what music I like and if others may want to follow me. (FYI: Follow in terms of reading comments/reviews on albums and seeing what I wanted to buy)
Here is the screenshot from the ten songs I choose.
The timing was pretty great, seeing as how I had recently completed my "15 albums" list:
The ten songs I chose were:
Shampoo Suicide
Star Guitar
New Year's Day
Voyager
Young Folks
God Moving Over the Face of the World
Climbing the Walls
I've Seen It All
Take Me Out
Flashing Lights
Am I recommending Ping to you?
No.
Do I think you'll probably - eventually - download iTunes 10?
Yes.
At that time, are you going to sign up on Ping?
Probably not, but if you do - you should follow me and I'll follow you...
Cause we all know Apple is such a struggling company with big difficulties about getting publicity for it's new products. Their inventions never seem to catch on and could use our support.
