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Apple and Facebook continue to pong over Ping

By , Friday, Oct 1, 2010 at 9:02 am
10

Steve Jobs interview D8

Facebook CTO Bret Taylor is "very confident" Facebook and Apple will be able to come to terms on integrating Apple's social music network with Facebook's social people network.

Ping launched with Facebook Connect so you could more easily find your friends, but the service was blocked by Facebook and then pulled by Apple, with rumors following the two had been going back and forth over a deal for up to 18 months and Steve Jobs complaining Facebook wanted "onerous" terms.

While Apple improved Ping with iTunes 10.0.1's inclusion of a sidebar and the ability to Ping music you already owned from within iTunes, the service is still off to a rocky start. It remains inaccessible from a web browser when you're away from your desktop iTunes and don't have an iPhone with you (blasphemy, but it could happen), and otherwise still feels like a work in progress.

So here's the question: would heavy Facebook integration make you want to use Ping more?

[Business Insider]

Rene Ritchie

Editor-in-Chief of iMore, Executive Producer at Mobile Nations, co-host of Iterate and ZEN and TECH, cook, grappler, photon wrangler.

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  1. Angel says:

    Yes, duh.

  2. Of course. With 500 million users I blogged this morning that if Facebook Connect had been there from Day 1 Ping would be well over 10 million users and probably more. My guess is Ping only has about 2.5 million and the vast majority are like me that took a peek and haven't been back for weeks. Facebook is the only way I will ever give Ping another try, but IMO don't believe Bret Taylor. If it was going to happen it would have happened already.

  3. Webvex says:

    No. There is nothing Apple could do to give me any interest in Ping. It shouldn't exist, period.

  4. Grant says:

    Importing Facebook friends (or Gmail contacts) is the ONLY way I'm going to have any friends on Ping. They need to get that hammered out for this thing to have any chance of succeeding, IMO.

  5. Rudy says:

    I signed up for ping, but never found a use for it. Maybe if ping was on facebook it would remind me I have a ping account lol

  6. Websyndicate says:

    Lame title

  7. Erik says:

    Finally a company that doesn't roll-over for Apple when they try to push something out to the public BEFORE sealing terms.

  8. Ryan says:

    Ping is pointless, i have no friends, can only follow artists and get no relevant information, get rid of it, itunes is already bogged down with too much stuff.

  9. Joost says:

    Maybe... but you'd still really have to sell me on it.

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