I don't think Ping is quite as stillborn as the tech media seems to think. I'm seeing lots of bands I like with 40-50K followers already. This isn't exactly mainstream Top 40 stuff either. If someone is taking the time to go find bands to follow they're at least somewhat engaged in the service. For example Band of Horses has ~316,000 followers on FaceBook -- they have ~30,000 on Ping in less than a month. Considering FaceBook has 5x as many users as registered iTunes users this is an impressive start.

Couple things:

1) Ping is only available in the US, so a straight comparison of user numbers to FB isn't necessarily valid. You have take the number of US users of both iTunes and FB, and I don't think that breakdown is readily available.

2) Non-mainstream stuff is likely to be overrepresented in these sorts of things, since people who are into to music are more likely to use such new music services and are also likely to have more varied tastes.

Ping is not US only. I have a Canadian iTunes account and had no problem creating a ping account.

Oops. I seem to remember reading comments from the original Ping announcement story that it was. I stand corrected.

My point is still valid though. To do proper comparison for Band of Horses, you have to take # of users in native English speaking markets. For FB, that is not the majority, though it is a large plurality; for iTunes, it may very well be the majority. Apple products aren't a significant part of the market in SE Asia, but FB is.

Maybe this was intentional? If Apple had opened with a functional last.fm competitor, the discussion would have been about all the privacy concerns and do I really want to share every song I listen to with the world?

This way the focus is on, look Apple fixed their mistake and it actually serves a purpose now.

Ping doesn’t actually publish any kind of information about your listening habits like last.fm does. All you can do is like music or comment on music. The only thing Ping publishes automatically (which is creepy enough if you buy a lot of music) is what you bought in the iTunes Store and who you followed.

This button is just a little shortcut for functionality that already existed but was ridiculously inaccessible before.

They haven't changed how Ping works. They just put a pop-up menu in place of that little arrow button next to the track name.

It's actually a pretty minor change, but obviously there was some confusion of how Ping worked, so the UI change seemed necessary.

I haven't signed up for Ping yet but does this mean it works for music I imported to iTunes but did not buy through the iTunes store?

You always could. It's just that you had to hunt down the album in the iTunes Store in order to "Like" something. And it was not "laughably tedious", as suggested in the article; you just click the little arrow next to the track name in your Library.

Now you can "Like" stuff directly from your Library.

All they've done is replace that little arrow-button with a pop-up menu. It's a pretty small change, overall, it just makes things more obvious.

Yes

The one caveat is that the song has to be available in the iTunes Store.