Yesterday, the world was introduced to Ping, a social network revolving around iTunes. Ping has been touted as the final MySpace killer, a social network for music and a way to discover new music based on what your friends are listening to, downloading and following. The most obvious gripe have been covered everywhere so I won’t get into more than just a summary here. Initially, Ping launched without Facebook integration. Though a problem, this is something that’ll be fixed so I don’t count it as a really big deal.

I have two real big issues with Ping, though. The first is that Ping allows to see what your friends bought on iTunes, not what they’re listening to. This is a problem. How much of the music on your iTunes player was purchased from the iTunes store? They took what could have been a pretty cool idea and castrated it. Who cares what your friends bought? Chances are, they didn’t buy anything. If everybody was buying lots of music, the music industry wouldn’t be in such dire straits.

This reeks of a concession to content providers. iTunes will always benefit from the shared experience people have around music. The more robust the experience and the more Apple is part of that, the more impulsive buys and buys based on recommendations they’ll receive. At the end of the day, word of mouth is still the largest purchase driver and the most trusted form of advertising. Apple is therefore incentivized to make this experience as inclusive as possible. Leaving out something as easy and basic as what your friends are listening to is something I don’t think Apple would overlook.

If I were a betting man, I would guess that major record labels would like to keep the community around sales. The thinking goes that if sharing is based on sales, then individual artist sales will rise as a result. Regardless, the major record labels certainly don’t want to encourage a music community in which the engagement is based on music that might have been obtained by nefarious means – or at least not direct sales.

My second issue with Ping isn’t so much an issue with the product as it is with Apple’s idea of extending the value of the long tail. This is of various limited appeal to consumers. The long tail is a natural occurrence. To oversimplify, as people share content they like, more people are exposed who can then share it with their friends. Content not liked is content not shared. This results in a very uneven distribution model – a large majority of impressions, sales, plays, etc focused on choice pieces of content. This system only works because the majority of consumers are passive. They don’t want to actively search for new music. They’d rather their friends just tell them about good music. Ping does nothing to address this underlying passivity therefore, Ping will do nothing to change the nature of the long tail.

The person most likely to see value out of the discovery aspects of Ping is your active consumer who won’t like Ping because the information they get is limited to purchases! This is such a small element of a normal user’s interaction with music that it’s almost statistically irrelevant in determining what people are actually listening to.

Apple has the ability to make Ping an amazing tool. All they really need to do is open up what people are listening to. Until then, Ping is second rate.