Thanks for nothing, Ping!

I watch the internet fairly closely, but I don’t really follow the world when they talk about major announcements. Every year around this time, Steve Jobs gives a demonstration unveiling everything Apple is doing for technology. This year, he announced changes to AppleTV, iPod models, and talked about how iTunes was moving in a social direction by introducing a service called Ping.

I upgraded iTunes to iTunes 10 last night just to play around with this feature. I really don’t get it. They give you a list of about 10 “Featured Artists” and 5 “Featured People” and a search box to find other people.

I found two of my friends, who I only knew to search for because they tweeted about using Ping, and also added Lady Gaga. That was the extent of operation I could do with it. I think it might show me what my friends listen to most, but I didn’t even keep it open long enough to verify this.

Something like this has a lot of potential because I’d love to discover new music by seeing what people I know are listening to. I just wish there were something there to work with. I’ll probably play with it a little more once I get home, but I’m definitely sitting at work, reading articles about it, wishing it were more than it was. Even just a little more.

By the way, there’s also huge backlash on Apple from the media regarding ease of spam in Ping.