Ping-B-Gone

Hip hip hooray! A new version of iTunes, 10.1, was released today. For me, the most exciting change is the ability to completely disable Ping. What is Ping? According to Apple, “Follow your favourite artists and friends to discover the music they're talking about, listening to, and downloading.” They're billing it as a social network centered around music. I personally had no interest in it when Apple announced it. Primarily because, like I just said, it's social networking. I have no interest in pretty much anything related to social networking.

But why didn't Apple just include that functionality from the start? They let you show, hide or completely disable everything else, but they didn't give the option to hide or disable Ping until now. Maybe it was just an oversight, and since there were lots of people online complaining about the inability to disable Ping they realized they needed to add it?

The conspiracy theorist in me, though, wants to say that they intentionally left that out. Why? Because there would be lots of people who, like me, would think it's dumb and would go and disable it right away. Rather, they not only didn't let you disable it, but put something in a prominent place on the store's home page, telling you that you should activate Ping on your account. And since there was no way to hide the Ping link in the iTunes sidebar it was always sitting there enticing people to check it out. Apple was bragging that in the first 48 hours after iTunes 10 launched they had over a million Ping users. I wonder how many still actually make use of it, two months later.

And I also find it interesting that the option to disable it is listed as a parental control, implying that the only reason to disable it is if you're a parent who doesn't want your child using it. Yes, there's a “hide” option in the General page, but that just hides the icon in the sidebar as opposed to completely disabling it.

But thankfully Apple decided to allow it to be disabled, so I can once again enjoy a Ping-free iTunes experience. I'm crossing my fingers and hoping that in iTunes 10.2 they'll recant their “no more colour icons” change they made in 10.0. Fortunately the trick that worked to restore the colour icons in 10.0 still works in 10.1 so I'm a happy camper.