When we've already built up 99% of the infrastructure required to share anything we want (e.g. messages, photos, videos, links, entire pages on Facebook), it's very hard to see the point of a service that specializes in sharing exactly one thing.
The timing was also horrible. Some of the technologies currently available for sharing are 5 or 10 years old or more, so what the heck was supposed to be revolutionary about Ping? It needed to arrive before there was Facebook or Twitter.
I actually thought the timing could have been good. When it was announced, MySpace was clearly in death-spiral mode but still a lot of bands were using it as their primary online presence. I thought Ping had at least a shot at being the place they moved to.
Obviously it didn't work out that way. My hunch is that Apple's feelings on the project were "lets throw this out there and see if it sticks". It clearly didn't, and now they'll move on. When you're making $1500 in profit a second you can experiment a little.
> My hunch is that Apple's feelings on the project were "lets throw this out there and see if it sticks"
Which is somewhat uncharacteristic of Apple and what some folks blame Google for doing repeatedly. I hope Ping's failure resulted in a lot of lessons learned about the social space.
When we've already built up 99% of the infrastructure required to share anything we want (e.g. messages, photos, videos, links, entire pages on Facebook), it's very hard to see the point of a service that specializes in sharing exactly one thing.
The timing was also horrible. Some of the technologies currently available for sharing are 5 or 10 years old or more, so what the heck was supposed to be revolutionary about Ping? It needed to arrive before there was Facebook or Twitter.