I concur. What a waste of time. - Stephen Mack

It's like 12 hours old... - Johnny from iPhone

True, Johnny, but why take it out of beta if it's not even close to ready for prime time? - Spidra Webster

What Spidra said. Don't open it until it actually does something. - Stephen Mack

How can you populate social recommendations without being... well... social. The Genius playlist feature benefited from years of collected data... Ping has 12 hours. Predicting 'social' ain't easy. How many apps on day 1 of the iPhone app store vs now? Instant gratification overload - Johnny from iPhone

Johnny, but there's LITERALLY nothing to do except set up a profile and follow other people. Read Dave's larger piece: http://scripting.com/stories... -- I agree with him 100%, there's nothing to do other than generic follow-unfollow social media wanking. - Stephen Mack

I'd argue that it's different with social media sites than online stores, Johnny. If you open a social media site before you have developed much in the way of things to do with it, people quickly go - see there's nothing to do - and leave the site. Or leave the site and badmouth it. It's to the advantage of a developer to make sure they've got at least some basic useful functions available before taking it off beta. Tribe.net was pretty empty in the beginning. But the tools where there for people to *create* useful content. So a dedicated base of early users created community. The way I'm hearing it from people already on Ping, that isn't there yet for Ping. In fact, I think it's pretty awful for a service that is supposed to be able recommending artists to friends and interacting with artists to have so few artists on it at launch time. And as a commenter to Dave's Flickr site said, Apple has got all this data they have already collected because of Genius. They could have auto-populated new profiles with that (after asking permission to do so, of course). - Spidra Webster

Stephen wins with the phrase of the day: "generic follow-unfollow social media wanking" - Louis Gray

How many people was Dave following? That would be handy to know - Johnny from iPhone

Ah, I take it back: You can actually like songs or share songs if you find them in iTunes. So I am wrong: There are, in fact, things to do. - Stephen Mack

Johnny, are you listing yourself as John and saying you live in Seattle? If that's you, can I follow you? - Stephen Mack

I'm signing up now. Bummed that the user name has to be the name on my credit card. Even more bummed that all reviews I've ever written on iTunes will now be changed to reflect that name. I don't necessarily want every stranger to know my full legal name. And I find other people's user pseuds entertaining. - Spidra Webster

You can edit the username freely, I think? - Stephen Mack

Underneath it it says "The name you enter is also the name associated with your account's billing information". I assume that if I choose a name other than the one on my credit card that it will cause a problem with iTunes Music Store purchases. - Spidra Webster

Hmm, I see. I guess if you only use gift cards that'd be a workaround. Weird choice on Apple's part; people like pseudonyms and pseudo-privacy. - Stephen Mack