iTunes Ping And Facebook: What’s Going On?

By Giles Turnbull (4:40 am, Sep 02 2010)

It seems the situation is more confused than I thought; some people have been able to connect Facebook with Ping, and other haven’t. See end of post for a number of updates.

OK, I give up. I’m confused. I have no idea what’s going on with Ping and Facebook.

On the one hand, we have the above screenshot, taken from Apple’s own Ping web page just this morning.

It clearly says you can connect Ping to Facebook. But. You can’t.

At least, I can’t. I’ve hunted through every single corner of the Ping pages inside iTunes. I’ve looked in the Account settings, I’ve edited my profile, and there’s nothing. There’s no way I can find of connecting Ping and Facebook. I’m not alone, either. There are plenty of people saying the same thing on Twitter.

On the other hand, we have this report from Kara Swisher, which confirms the lack of Facebook integration inside Ping, and quotes Steve Jobs saying that Facebook’s terms were “too onerous”.

So why does Apple’s own web page still say “Find even more music fans with a quick search, by sending email invites, or by connecting to your Facebook account.”?

My conclusion: I think Facebook’s terms only became onerous at the last minute. And the Ping web page is going to be edited very soon.

UPDATE: Well, this is weird. It seems that some people have been able to link up iTunes and Facebook, and others haven’t. See the comments for details. But if the two services are linked up, why did Steve Jobs tell Kara Swisher that Facebook’s terms were too onerous? Strange.

UPDATE 2: Dan Frommer has noted the same issue.

UPDATE 3: Thanks to Markus Ramstedt on Twitter for pointing out this moment in this official Ping how-to video:

22 comments »

About the author

Giles Turnbull is a freelance writer in England. He writes for the Press Association and The Morning News. He has a website you can ignore and a Twitter account you needn't follow.

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Posted in iTunes, News, Software |

Jeroen
I actually could successfully link Ping to my facebook with no problem. Not sure thoug how I did.. When I’m back at home in a few hours I’ll try to reproduce and send you some feedback.
Cheers,
Jeroen
Greenhouse
You can connect to Facebook, just only to check if your friends are on Ping. Similar to how you can connect gmail, or another email client to Facebook to check for friends in your email contacts on Facebook.
http://gilest.org Giles Turnbull
Jeroen: thank you, that would be very interesting.
If some people can connect with Facebook, and some others can’t, perhaps it’s a location issue. I’m in the UK, maybe it’s not been switched on for UK users yet. Or maybe it’s just a phased roll-out.
Helius
I managed to connect until it came up with some message about none of my FB friends being on Ping or something similar. Not bothered by it, but clearly the FB integration is there to some extent.
Slaughter
When I went through setting mine up I was able to search Facebook for friends who were using Ping, but no one was yet because I downloaded it so soon. I had a friend send me a friend request, but I don’t know if he used the Facebook feature or not, but I did see this option…even though I can’t find it now.
Greenhouse
I must revise my post! I just refreshed my Ping page and the Facebook button disappeared. No joke. Yesterday when I installed iTunes10 I linked Ping to Facebook and got the same “no friends on Ping” warning. But today that linked bit of text is totally gone just replaced by the email suggestion.
interesting…
http://xcoolapps.com XCool
I managed to sign in and was prompted to link with my Facebook account. I managed to link it, but was told that no one in my Facebook list has got Ping yet – usually I’m the first.. :)
http://www.otrial.de Oliver
Same here, not able to connect. Being an artist even not able to set up my own artist profile, as it seems. Not talking about missing option to post status updates yourself… Ping seems pretty useless so far…
http://gekjr.com George E. Kennedy, Jr.
I found at the bottom of my profile page last night. Was able to connect, but none of my FB are pinging yet.
http://www.cotlb.com Luke
Ditto. It was there yesterday when I was first setting up Ping, but nobody was on. Today it’s gone. Snags in negotiations, or a technical issue?
The idea of Ping could be pretty cool. But friends have to embrace it for the network to function, and this isn’t helping. And artists need to be able to easily create their own feeds. Lady Gaga and Coldplay are fine, but I’m an artist and there are countless artists that would like to take advantage of this.
Pretty tepid first rollout.
Mr T
I managed to connect to FB last night though it said ‘none of your friends are available..” tried again this morning – and facing same issue as you guys. The whole FB has practically vanished.
i.m.h.o. if ping doesn’t linkup with Twitter and Facebook – it’ll very soon fade away..as most of the high profile artists & their management has plenty on their plate of managing the current twitter / fan pages. If there’s no API for integrating it all from one place – ping will be pretty much useless.
99% comments for existing artists seems to be ‘staged’ so not much going on there for real at the moment.
Hiro
no facebook connection here. in canada…
http://bust3r.com Buster Heine
i connected with Facebook when I first downloaded, but didn’t have any friends signed up for Ping yet. I told a couple friends to try it out and they were able to find me, but 2 hours later when I went to try to reconnect through facebook the option wasn’t there anymore. Very strange.
Tyrone
Nothing here, I installed last night and even just got an email from the iTunes Store highlighting the functionality to connect to Facebook, but the button isn’t there.
On a side note, most of the comments on artist posts that are in my feed, are spam. Some guy named Sajid had commented on about 50 artists pages Get a free iphone…… If that is what is going to happen with Ping, I will be turning it back off very quickly, especially since there doesn’t seem to be a way to block from seeing someone’s comments.
Spanish Inquisition
Was glad I committed suicide on FB, after having to reconfigure privacy settings over and over again. And now Apple is starting that poop within iTunes ? Contemplating iTunes suicide !
Bmouch
Well it would be nice to link up with Facebook and find my friends that way, and I was able to link up with Facebook but nothing came from that, so I am not sure if it is actually doing a search for those friends. It could also be that I was the first person to set up Ping out of my friends. Also another interesting thing is how frustrating this Ping start is. There is an extreme lack of musical artists, there are various troubles uploading a profile picture, and it would be nice to have some extra integration in there. I do like the focus upon music though.
Todd Shirley
Just signed up at 3:20pm EST and there is no Facebook stuff in itunes, but it still mentions Facebook in the welcome letter I got in my e-mail. You’d think if they could strip the facebook stuff out the itunes store, they could do it in the welcome letter boilerplate.
“…You can even check to see which of your Facebook friends also use Ping by connecting Ping to Facebook when editing your profile.” NOT!
Charlie Poopa
Calling all trolls: unless you’re a chick or some gay dude, Facebook is friggin lame. And so is Ping. Grow up.
porkchop1234
I got the answer to everyones Ping linking to FB problems. What you do is simply go into your FB account settings and delete the stupid thing entirely. Don’t you dummies know using FB opens up your private information to the world? Do yourselves a favor stop playing Farmville get off FB and get real friends.
tom swift
Have never used FB [ I'm very low profile on the internet] so Ping would not be useful for me. I don’t really like the look of itunes 10. Took a look at apple.com’s support discussion forum and wasn’t too encouraged with the types of problems that people were posting.
I’m staying on itunes 9 for the time being – I don’t fix what’s not broken.
(Heck, in our basement gameroom we have our old, old 233mhz imac running itunes 4, hooked up to an old stereo system. It does what itunes was meant to be – it plays music and plays it well.)
ed
According to Gizmodo, Apple was banned from facebook because they used the Facebook API even though they did not agree on the terms. way to go !
http://gizmodo.com/5628919/facebook-blocked-pings-api-access-because-apple-didnt-have-authorization-to-use-it
Geert Van Boxelaer
No FB for my Ping either.