Where to start? To the uninitiated, Apple has essentially created their own self contained social network with iTunes Ping. iTunes Music Store users can now follow friends and artists, a la Twitter or Facebook and share their favorite songs and albums. On the surface, it seems like a logical plan for Apple to push themselves into a new field and continue to iterate the iTunes world. However, there are many flaws with the service under the surface.

I, like many people, love to talk about music and debate different tastes with my friends. However, I don’t find much use for Ping in it’s current set of features. In a very Apple-like move, the service is locked into the iTunes desktop software. If they are trying to build a social network from the ground up in 2010, why WHY on Earth do you lock it down to just the in-club of existing users. I think this walled garden of Ping, which is even more a set away from Facebook’s walled garden, will be a major blow to their growth. If you are looking to grow the network, it must be sharable with outsiders. Apple should really work on a web based version of this service to accompany the in-software version.

Secondly, actually posting to your own profile is too many steps to be useful. I should be able to like and post albums right from my own library. If I have a music blog (which I have considered starting), I should be able to import the RSS feed from that to my Ping. On the reverse, I should be able to get a feed of my latest Ping posts into other services and sites. Right now, with this lack of somewhat basic, important functionality, the service is acting like a way for me to sell iTunes songs to my friends (just without any kickbacks). There should be more incentive, or some sort of easier recognizable gratification for using the service by sharing my favorite songs.

Right now, Ping is too closed in and lacking too much functionality for me to actually take advantage of it. Which leads me to my last point: where does it get too be too many social networks to manage? iTunes Ping is just another feed to check, another Inbox. As is the problem with any service: if your friends you actually care about and maintain relationships with, then what good is another service? This was the downfall (among other things) of Google Buzz. Sure, it’s only been out for a few days, but I really don’t see Ping taking off as much as Apple is hoping it to be. We’ll see though.

I’m going to keep trying it out for a little while to get a better opinion, so you can follow me on Ping over here.

P.S. – Don’t get me started on the new iTunes icon or the new interface icons…

You may also remember Ping, the Chinese food delivery boy, from Seinfeld. Also: golf clubs

Editor’s note: I’ve discussed this kind of topic recently, but I think it’s worth bringing up again.

I’ve said a few things about Facebook privacy before here. I don’t want to belabor the point made by Jason Calacanis and on Diggnation, but there is something bigger going on here, bigger than just Facebook, to discuss.

Facebook has been moving more and more to resemble the always public services such as Twitter, Flickr, and others. The controversy mainly stems from the history of Facebook being a private service with your information only facing towards your friends. Great, sounds good. But as so much of this information is public and searchable by people outside of your circle of friends, there are some issues to consider.

My point is: If I give all my information out to Facebook, or even Twitter, or even this blog for my friends to see. We friend each other and discuss different topics and catch up on the latest we’re doing. Fine, great, sign me up. The real issue going on here is when companies use this information to fine tune their marketing. If you take away the part of social media that is your friends and contacts, it really just becomes a feeding ground for marketers. In reality though of using these services, we get the benefit of keep up with our friends and sharing what we are doing. If you consider that next time you tweet or status update or whatever, it will make you ask: am I sharing something useful to friends or am I just feeding the marketing department of some company?

While, yes, I would rather see ads that are relevant to things I care about, I worried that Facebook is seeing us, the user, as a point of data to be used for advertising dollars and missing the mark of the people using the service. I know I’ve said this before, but at what to degree will this go on?

Social media sites will come and go, I don’t know if the problem is necessarily Facebook right now as it is the culture of over-sharing. Yes, Facebook’s privacy settings are confusing, but as public-ness becomes more and more a part of our society, maybe it’s time to really rethink how much we share. The tool isn’t just the problem it’s us.

Is it just me, or has Facebook lost it’s soul? The whole original premise of the site was a perfect storm for success: college students, later non-students easily able to connect with each other around the world. Great, sign me up! As with any Internet startup, there comes a point where they need to grow. They need to prove to investors and the mainstream that they are not simply a curiosity. I believe, for Facebook, it was around they introduced the Fan pages (which are now “Liking” something, same thing with different vocabulary). Fan pages gave business’, non-profits, groups, clubs, etc a platform to broadcast their message out to a lot of people at once. While in principal this is the same premise as Twitter, this was fully integrated into Facebook’s walled garden.

In order to keep up with future of the open web, Twitter, and being more visible in Google search, Facebook began experimenting with unlocking our data. First it was the confusing privacy settings, the accidental public settings for the photo albums, and now to the latest: the profile/fan page linking. In the age of the Internet, where free and openness reigns, business can take more and more advantage of this public data. I believe this is the idea behind Facebook’s ongoing destruction of it’s own walled garden. It also doesn’t help that the privacy settings require a PhD to deciefer. The more Facebook goes down this path of opening for the sake of business and leaving their original base of people connecting with other people, I feel they are loosing the magic of what originally made Facebook so popular.