The Continuing Uselessness Of iTunes Ping

Steve: Social media is not supposed to be annoying.

This morning, I noticed that iTunes has updated Ping to work with Twitter accounts. As the majority of social media music sites and apps (Last.FM, Soundhound, etc.) also have this capability, this interaction only makes sense. Turns out, once you give iTunes your Twitter information, you automatically post all your actions to Twitter. Like a song and click that on Ping? It automatically Tweets it, not giving you an option to not take that action.

If you’re like me, you occasionally sit down in front of your iMac and just click through your iTunes library. I’m doing it to just look for band or albums that I haven’t listened to in quite some time and sometimes, I come across something that I completely forgot I even owned. Mostly, it’s so I have a constant self-reminder of how hip and cool I am because of all the indie snob rock I won. Then, I put on a wool snow cap in the summer and get a coffee. While listening to Arcade Fire’s “Funeral” on vinyl. And smoking Parliaments. This line of hipster stereotypical humor doing anything for you?

What does all that mean? It means that I would click the Ping Like button as I scrolled through my library. Since I don’t feel like flooding my Twitter followers timeline with songs that I like, I’m not going to click the Ping Like button as often. So, at least for me, it makes the social interaction of telling Ping followers that I like a song even more irrelevant.

Yes, I spend time ogling my iTunes library. Hell, it’s got to be a better timewaste on the computer than staring endlessly at baseball stats (which is code for internet porn, don’t tell anyone). Besides, didn’t people used to just flip through their vinyl collection way back in the 70s? Ha. Those people are totally old. Old can’t touch me.

The lamest part about the automatic Tweet? You can’t even customize it. When I like to be self-important and pretentious by telling everyone what song I’m listening to, I at least like to be amusing while doing it. Ping won’t even let me do that. Here’s what it does:

http://twitter.com/#!/Chiccywood/status/13235575100280832

Weak effing sauce buddy. This mostly annoys me because the word “likes” isn’t capitalized. I’m very particular when it comes to punctuation and capitalization.

So to sum up, Ping is even more awfulerest now. In fact, it kind of sucks. It sucks really, really hard. Of course I’ll continue to use it though as I am nothing more than Steve Jobs’ bitch.