Apple → Ping is dead... Hooray!

What a dud. At least Apple finally put it out to pasture... Didn't they relase this thing because they didnt want to pay Facebook money to integrate with it? I guess they paid now, with FB integration in iOS6 and ML.

quote:

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Apple has officially shut down its failed social network Ping. Reports in June signaled that Apple's social iTunes network would be removed from the next version of iTunes. Apple has since been advertising the fact that the service would shut down as of last night, September 30th. The Ping menu item no longer appears in the current version of iTunes.

Ping was launched in late 2010 and described as a social network for music, allowing iTunes users to share favorite artists and music. Apple CEO Tim Cook acknowledged in June that "the customer voted and said 'this isn't something that I want to put a lot of energy into'."

»www.macrumors.com/2012/1 ··· -closes/

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Funny. I just booted up iTunes 10.6.3 and saw Ping magically disappear from the left window.

What's a ping?

Now let's hope iAd is killed off next. I never bought into Apple's theory that "ads could be beautiful that customers will click to watch them".

This isn't the freakin Superbowl. Thats about the only time the vast majority of people pay attention to advertising.

Also Apple's total control freak model made it undesirable to agencies, which wanted creative control...

They created it because they saw they were losing out on tons of cash with all the folks who were releasing free apps with big ol banner ads on the bottom, and AdMob walking away with the loot. They tried to buy AdMob, but Google beat em out, so they bought Quattro and turned em into iAd.

And it would have worked if they kept things simple, and affordable.

Instead they tried to glorify it like it was the next best thing since slice bread in the world of mobile advertising, and failed miserably.

WTF was with the $1M minimum commitment from agencies? They've since reduced it to $100K and still its a flop...