Happy Labor Day....or the non-golf Ping!

Hope you've started your 3 1/2 day weekend....now about Ping from Apple and iTunes...

Dave Van Dyke and I both added it to our iTunes account and as DVD is apt to do...he dug deeper than me and came up with the Top 10 problems with Ping!  Here then, DVD's Top 10....

Ping has incredible potential, but this feels a bit more like v0.1 than 1.0. Here are the issues….


(1) Band pages are extremely limited, and most artists are currently excluded.



Apple has indicated that artists must be invited, and the selection is insanely slim at launch. If your world revolves around Katy Perry, Diddy, and Lady Gaga, you're set - otherwise, this was launched too early. Meanwhile, profiles are geared towards individuals, not groups. So why not tie artist profiles to those present on the iTunes Store - that is, at launch?



(2) No Facebook connectivity.



Maybe Apple and Facebook will eventually make the handshake, but the paint is still drying on this one - and that means...



(3) This is a ghost town.



Sure, you can join hands with Jason Bentley, Rick Rubin, and Ted Cohen. But most of your friends are still coming on board - and probably unaware of the walled-in Ping.



(4) And, not much musical connectivity outside the iTunes walls, for that matter.



Increasingly, musical lives are spread across important properties like Pandora, YouTube, MySpace Music, and Facebook. Certainly, a sizable chunk of the 160 million-plus iTunes users have expressed musical preferences on at least one of these outside services. So why not build the bridge?



(5) Users can only check three favorite genres for their profiles.



Most music fans criss-cross over lots of different genres, and loathe over-categorization. The iPod collection helped to blur genre buckets, so why reinforce them here?



(6) No usage-based favorites or other listening activity streams.



What are you listening to right now? 5 minutes ago? 5 days ago? What are your top-rated iTunes tracks - purchased or not?



(7) No Beatles.



Does a Beatles song define your musical identity? Well, not on Ping, as favorite songs must be sold in the iTunes Store.



(8) Spam.



Already, fake accounts are proliferating (ie, Ben Folds), and Ping could become a giant sandbox for shady characters. That includes fake accounts, phishing attacks, and other niceties that confront networks like Facebook and Twitter on a daily basis. Hopefully, Apple isn't learning on the job.



(9) Where's my Twitter connectivity?



Or, is a tie-in buried somewhere? Seems like status updates and favorites should cross-pollinate.



(10) No Facebook Integration.



Oh, sorry, that was #2.

Comments to Dave here! And be sure to copy me on your comments here!

Have a great weekend....on Tuesday I'll share my email chat with Jerry D (a good one!)...talk about the changing radio network business and model...more on the PRA....----teej