Having played around with Ping for a while, we're ready to make a judgement. Bottom line; it's a good idea, it needs a lot of work. It almost feels like a beta and not a finished product. We like the idea of a mix of Twitter and Facebook for music, but it's lacking in navigation and search options.
At Apple's press conference they touted the ability to connect Ping with Facebook to make searching for friends easier. For whatever reason, the capability is not in Ping, which severely cripples the experience. Trying to find friends on the service is a crapshoot, as you're limited to searching manually by name. That's the biggest drawback to Ping right now, it's too hard to be social.
Another thing we don't like is the navigation. When an artist posts a video or a picture, you have to scroll down through a list of all their updates to get to what you want, there's no option to see all their pictures and videos in one central location. Plus, the navigation buttons at the top are actually navigation buttons for the iTunes store. We feel there needs to be dedicated buttons for Ping while you're in Ping.
What we do like about the service is mainly the idea of the service right now. Ping makes it easy to follow what your favorite artists are doing, and also creates an easy way to see music recommendations and concerts. As time goes on and Apple improves navigation and people search, we're sure the service will take off, but at the moment it just feels like a half-baked idea.
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