So Long To Apple’s Music Social Network: Ping, We Hardly Knew Ye

Ping was scheduled for unceremonious termination at the end of September, and now it’s definitely gone dark. Clicking on the Ping link in the iTunes sidebar now returns an error, if it even still appears there. Our own Josh Constine foretold its demise back in September, and now it’s gone, both on mobile and the desktop.

Here’s the thing about Ping: it probably won’t be missed. The social networking effort from Apple got off to a rough start, amid problems with Facebook integration, and it didn’t get much better from there. There was hope it would be revived thanks to some social help from Twitter, but that didn’t come to pass. People just didn’t seem interested in participating in a social network that lived only inside of iTunes itself, and that essentially operated as a thinly veiled promotional machine for iTunes music content.

It’s not surprising that it’s gone, only that it took this long, really.