Apple iTunes' Ping launched Wednesday night to a flurry of chatter lauding it as a MySpace killer, only to land Thursday morning amid criticism and a nasty break-up with Facebook. Now that the dust is beginning to settle, let's take a look at what Ping is, as well as what it could have been.

Om claimed that Ping is the future of social commerce, but its sole focus on purchases and its presence behind a walled garden may hinder that bright future. Here are the four main issues Apple has to work on quickly for Ping to be successful:

Ping's main method of social interaction is based only on new purchases.

In order to populate a social network of any kind, you need to give users the ability to share whatever it is they bring with them. I have over 6000 songs on my laptop alone, and that's not including what I have stored on my external drive. Probably a third of those were purchased via iTunes. In order to share any of that music with those who are following me, I have to click out of Ping and into the iTunes Store, find an album I already own, and click Like on the drop-down menu. It's a counter-intuitive UI involving too much effort on the part of the user. My music stream and my actions on certain favorite or hated songs can already be shared on other services. Why would I bother going through all that when I can click Love on last.fm (which is already running in my dock) and share that song through another social network, which may already be providing direct links to Amazon MP3 or another service for purchase?

In addition, Ping is so divorced from the iTunes experience that when I let it auto-populate my Music I Like selections at sign-up, soon I had 10 selections of my kids' music, which they bought with gift cards they'd received as presents. No, Ping, those one-star selections of Hannah Montana and the Chipmunk movie soundtracks are not music I like. In fact, when rating that music in iTunes, I think that one-star rating I assigned the kids' music said I really didn't like it at all. Buying does not equal liking.

Ping doesn't allow you to create new tangential conversations, or share additional statuses, locations, or activities with your social graph.

In order to begin any conversation on Ping, I have to do something involving the iTunes store: hunt down a song or album and Like or Post it, or buy something. I can't begin a conversation with Hey, did any of you catch that live Arcade Fire show on YouTube? What did you think? Again, there's an opportunity here for smart-linking to products based on organic conversations, and Apple is missing the boat. I may think to leave a comment if a purchase or a like happens by in my stream, but if I've already liked or bought an album and want to bring it up later, I'd have to go digging for the old conversation. I can't start another one.

The concept may be Apple, but the UI certainly isn't.

The one point that any Apple fanboy (or fangirl) has always been able to make without argument is how intuitive Apple's UIs have always been. It's the original company with a plug-in-and-go M.O. for its products, yet even on Wednesday night, when I joined Ping and talked about it with the early adopter crowd on Twitter, we were all stumbling about. If people who have more than 400 log-in IDs for social networks are confused about how to go about interacting with each other on a social site, how will an average user be able to figure it out? The familiar status box you see at the top of the screen on every social network is missing. If you want to comment on another user's activity, you have to seek out a small link to pop up a comment box (an existing whitespace would be much more obvious). Worst of all, the drop-down menu that appears on albums or songs in your stream appears to be part of the Buy Album button by design, which could make wary users afraid they might purchase the album rather than comment on it.

The social graph is missing.

This is Creating a Social Network 101. No one wants to sign up for a new service, only to manually seek out the same group of people they are friends with on Facebook and follow on Foursquare. They want a quick and simple method of importing contacts from a service like Facebook Connect. The post-launch implosion of an Apple-Facebook deal to piggyback on Facebook's social graph was a devastating blow for populating a new service. Apple needs to do something quickly to replace it, or those signing up will quickly tire of logging in only to find there's no new activity in the past three hours. Social networks need a constant stream of activity to keep users engaged.

As for trying to convince my friends to use the service, they don't want to be bothered, for the most part. They're already using services on Facebook or MySpace to share music in a much simpler fashion than Ping is providing. In the nearly 48 hours since launch, I've assembled a circle of real-world friends and tech connections that, with combined followers and those I follow, is less than 30. Considering I have over 300 friends on Facebook, that's a pretty small percentage of my social graph.

I listen to my iTunes library during my work day, alternating with Pandora. While I'll frequently click over to last.fm (if iTunes is running) or Pandora to like or block a song, it's too hard to do that with Ping because I have to take a break from whatever I'm doing to hunt it down. My other social music sharing is as simple as flipping to another window and clicking a single button. When I do check in to Ping, I have to manually refresh and it's often hours between updates. Right now, Ping is a lonesome place that seems to be populated only by diehard early adopters and Apple fans.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req'd):

With Ping, Apple Builds a Social Network Inside a Walled Garden

THE BIG BANG THEORY

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Is the term social media hurting strategic communicators in the digital space?

Before you tell me I'm crazy, stop and think for a second.

Plenty of people have wondered about the term before (Google social media term and you'll find a 2007 post from Jeremiah Owyang on the topic) but I'm thinking of this from a slightly different angle.

Is the term social media leading clients to take the wrong approach to their online activities?

How many companies have you encountered taking a scorched earth approach to their social media activities? I'm not naive enough to think that two words would lead us to a silver bullet situation, but do these two current words adversely affect some companies' approaches to online interaction? I'm not suggesting we change the term I think it's here to stay in the short- to mid-term, at least. However, perhaps identifying challenges can help us on the agency side to address them.

Consider the term for a second.

Social media.

What image does that conjure up? Videos with comments enabled? Text with sharing features enabled? Tweets of links to stories about you? These might fall into a definition of social media, but they're not really two-way not truly. What's more, they do seem to embody the approach taken to social media by many organizations public and private alike.

Suppose for a moment we drop social media as a term and adopt a much more simplified online networking. We'd be using a term that, inherently, implies two important characteristics:

• Two-way interaction. Networking is, at its core, a two-way interaction. You need to speak and to listen. Networking doesn't involve broadcasting.
• Long-term. Networking involves relationships. Relationships take time to nurture.

Nothing rocket-science based here, right? This is stuff that's preached all the time. However, if it's that easy, why are companies still engaging in marketing activities that essentially consist of one-shot, one-way fire-and-forget promotions that do nothing to shift the needle in the long term?

Back to online networking. What changes if we use that term?

• YouTube: Videos with comments becomes Engaging people in a story, or enabling other people to tell your story as they see it
• Blog: Text with sharing becomes a genuine conversation, where you solicit and respond to feedback from your stakeholders
• Twitter: Tweets of links to stories about you becomes an opportunity to engage in real-time conversations with people

Changing a term won't solve a widespread problem, and there's much more to the issue than just a simple term (inter-discipline differences, for one, are another huge gap). I'm not suggesting we drop social media for online networking. However, if shifting the way you think can help even slightly to put you in the shoes of the people you work with, and that can help you to identify problems and solutions, then surely it's worth it.

What do you think?

Nielsen applies a wide variety of methodologies to derive insights from our data for clients and the marketplace on what consumers watch. Our recently published What Americans Do Online article produced a fantastic level of interest, including questions and suggestions about other ways to look at the data. Since this is how we typically work with clients, collaborating on how to get to the best analysis, we acknowledge that data alone doesn't always provide the complete picture.

The following alternative analysis, comparing category- and site-level data, for example, shows the different insights made possible by alternate approaches and interpretations. We have long taken pride in our leadership in measurement science and our participation in rich debate around methodology to arrive at the best insight possible. We're looking forward to continuing the conversation to develop new ways to look at measurement both online and in the mobile arena.

For the mobile element of the research, our original share of time analysis used the average time spent at a category-level, the broad groupings of websites that offer similar types of content. This time we went to a more granular level, looking at share of time by basing it on the total time at the individual site-level.

This alternative way of slicing the data still shows Email to be, by far, the dominant sector in terms of mobile time, although this dominance shrinks by a few delta points to 38.5% from 41.6%. Search is another that nets out with a smaller share, although by less than a percentage point from 7.1% to 6.3%.

The share held by Social Networking remains very similar but News & Current Events comes out much stronger using the site-level analysis at a 7.2% share of time compared to 4.4% of time using the category-level analysis.

Share of time on Portals shows something more dramatic, with a change from 11.6% to 4.6% share of time, but this doesn't mean that people are spending any less time on Portal sites. Nielsen classifies both channels and brands into categories and so a category-level analysis includes both brands (e.g. Google) as well as channels under than brand (e.g. Google News). Using the initial methodology means that all Google time would be assigned to Portals (because Google is a portal) but using the site-level method means the Google News element would be assigned to the News & Current Events sector. Thus, the Portal element is limited to more general and entry pages rather than including content-specific sectors such as news.

Is it just me or do we not talk enough about Dexter around here? I hereby vow less Doctor Who and more Dexter. Who's with me? It'll be a party. We'll serve bloody marys. On these coasters!

Source: Showtime Via: Incredible Things

Apple announced just a few hours ago that it's new music-centered social network Ping has surpassed 1 million users in a mere two days.

While the announcement may seem impressive, if you consider that iTunes has over 160 million accounts tied to credit cards (and certainly a lot more if you include accounts without cards), I'm honestly surprised Apple didn't hit the 1 million line in 24 hours.

According to Apple, one-third of people who downloaded iTunes 10 have signed up for Ping. If we're counting 1 million users out of 3 million, Ping definitely appears to be more of a success. But it remains to be seen if that momentum will carry through as more users upgrade.

As a somewhat related comparison, Google's Buzz social network for Gmail which had around 170 million users at the time of Buzz's release saw tens of millions of users in two days. Before you accuse me of fanboyism, let me note the following: Yes, it was certainly easier for users to sign up for Buzz since it didn't require downloading and installing new software, as well as going through a registration process. Buzz is also admittedly in no way a success for Google.

But at the same time, Buzz and Ping shared the same problem many budding social networks do nobody knew what to do with them when they launched. Buzz was clearly a stab at Twitter-meets-Friendfeed conversations in Gmail, but aside from importing their current social networks into the service, I didn't see many conversations actually taking place on the service. It was one of many services I've signed up for, but was never motivated to actually do something with it.

Ping, meanwhile, suffers the same what now problem. It's easy enough to sign up for it, but then you're faced with searching for your friends, and finding artists that you like on the service. Once you're following people, you're mainly seeing artists recommend their albums something which I don't think fans really need help with. Artists can also post photos and post cute messages, but at this point that's something they can do better on MySpace or Facebook.

I wouldn't be surprised if many users are signing up for Ping, but remain clueless with what to do with it. Apple needs to get its Facebook friend importing up and running again, and clearly define what people can do with Ping, before it can become a thriving social network.

Tags: Buzz, Google Buzz, Ping, social network

Companies: Apple, Google

There's a saying, technology changes, people don't. Yet, when we consider the impact of technology on our daily lives, some very interesting observations surface

A pen now feels awkward to hold and as such, our penmanship is deteriorating.

It's now common to sit at a dinner table with family and friends where some are actively communicating with others, listening to music or gaming via mobile devices.

We are redefining the perception, boundaries and thresholds for privacy as we once knew it.

The future of the art of long form writing is at risk of becoming shrtr and less formal #forrealz.

For some, technology encourages immersion and introverted experiences in public settings, reducing the natural human dynamics of engagement. To counter, coffee shops and cafes are becoming laptop and WIFI free.

For others, social networking online is converting introverts into digital extroverts, rewarding participation with confidence boosting actions such as responses, likes, friend requests, shares, etc.

To connect with other human beings now in the future is not only changing, it's evoking a sense of Digital Darwinism. The mantra of Engage or Die! was born to make the point that what was, what is, and what will be are no longer linked to all we know and instead, demand an expanded perspective.

Social networking is pervading led by the clicking, connecting, and sharing of hundreds of millions of Internet denizens around the world. While Facebook is the digital equivalent to your online residence, Twitter is reflective of the me in social media. Twitter is not a social network, it is a series of disparately connected personalities linked through friendship, admiration, education, and context. How we embrace and invest our persona in this paradigm says more about the future of digital culture and ourselves than we might imagine.

With the introduction of Apple's new pseudo social network Ping, conversations lit up Twitter ultimately sparking a trending topic, we don't need another social network. Indeed, there is a prevailing sense of social media fatigue (aka social network fatigue (SNF). But as good friend Sarah Lacy recently said, If You've Got Social Media Fatigue, UR DOIN IT WRONG.

At a recent Girls in Tech event hosted at KickLabs in San Francisco, Twitter co-founder Evan Williams inferred that Twitter is actually a cure for information overload. Williams likens Twitter to a recipient-driven medium where people who have something to say can now find and reach the right audience, That's a much better situation for both the publisher of the information and the consumer of it. So recipient-based media can scale better in a world of infinite information.

@Ev also discussed the future of relevance and how Tweets will adapt to your interests. He compared the experience to Google, Google is very good at I need to solve a problem, I need to buy something, I need an answer. Twitter is more I'm interested in many things, I don't know what I need to know.' What we need to get much better at is scaling that system so you don't have to pay attention to everything, but you don't miss the stuff you care about.

The State of the Evolving Egosystem

Over the years, measuring the impact of Twitter as a medium, proved difficult and elusive as details and numbers did not emanate from Twitter itself. Third-parties using APIs helped us paint the landscape to visualize the tremendous proliferation of what started as a microblog and later evolved into an intricate system for sharing, discovering, and voicing our inner monologue. To help, Williams posted details, stats, and direction to the Twitter blog. As a result, some very interesting usage patterns and adoption rates were revealed.

First, Twitter boasts over 145 million registered users. In April at its inaugural Chirp conference, Twitter announced 105 million users tweeting upwards of 65 million times a day. The number of active accounts however, remains unknown. As Twitter better explains its mission, purpose, and value system to everyday consumers, the number will only continue to grow.

Evan Williams also shared a glimpse of the Twitter ecosystem and how individuals connect to one another. If the Web is Dead Twitter users have yet to hear the news. Twitter.com and m.twitter.com account for 92% of all access and communication.

Social Science Will Reveal the Future of Social Networkings

I believe that in order to truly understand technology, the internet, social media and its impact on society, business, and culture, social science becomes paramount.

Social science is the study of human society and social relationships and its role in the evolution of Twitter, social networking and the future of online societies is paramount. While we focus on the future, we must also look at the past and the present to find meaning, purpose, and insight to steer progress. This rapid evolution requires study in order to navigate change and define a course of action and the passage ways to what lies ahead.

As technology and the internet affect human behavior and culture, understanding how we got here will help us affect where we are going. The future of communication, relationships, and education is in your handsand your status updates, tweets, likes and connections.

Connect with Brian Solis on Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Facebook
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There are plenty of news organizations on twitter however most of them are a study in what not to do. However, one organization has risen above glorified RSS feeds and with a single twitter account changed my opinion of an entire news division.

Here's how @YahooNews changed the game.

The secret weapon People

Check out their bio,

The official Twitter account for Yahoo! News, the leading online news site. Tweets are hand-picked by the Y! News Team and 100% RSS feed free!

Hand picked? How quaint in these days of twitter feeds. They know that using human beings is what sets them apart. This strategy takes time, effort, & money but the resulting authenticity and value is priceless.

(More proof is found in the fact that the tweets come from Tweetdeck)

#Hashtags

I'd probably die of shock if the @NYTimes ever actually used hashtag. I mean why would an organization want to increase the visibility of their tweets while contributing to the larger conversation?

Yahoo liberally uses hashtags on everything from #Hurricane news to #MIA airport evacuations.

Lists

Yahoo News creates excellent Twitter lists around news subjects.

• Hurricanes http://twitter.com/YahooNews/hurricanes
• Supreme Court http://twitter.com/YahooNews/scotus
• even the Discovery Channel Shooting http://twitter.com/YahooNews/discovery

It's nothing short of astounding that a news organization is helping me listen to others. These lists sometimes even include rival news sites but Yahoo seems to actually care about creating curated and useful lists.

I'm a heavy user of Twitter lists and this was the tipping point where I became a real fan of @YahooNews.

Replies

Yes there are a few national organizations that use hashtags and a couple even create a lists but how many organizations will actually reply?

Egads! Is that actually humor?

YahooNews just get's it.

The list of what Yahoo is doing right just keeps going. Everything from excellent syntax to new style retweets, and even attribution are all the result of actual people understanding how to use twitter. In doing so they've created one of the most useful and authentic news sources on Twitter.

Bravo @YahooNews

Kamau High / Speakeasy:
Controversial Duke Nukem Forever' Will Finally Be Released Duke Nukem Forever, a video game synonymous with never being released, is finally being released. The first person shooter about a space marine with a penchant for off-color humor who battles aliens with increasingly destructive weapons

This is still just a concept, but the cruciform Power/Strip surge protector does more than keep your gadgets pious. Oversized adapters and bricks are welcome on its spreading crossbars, and a full 12 outlets means no more arguments among your disciples over who gets to charge first.

[via CNET]