Ping, Apple"s social network for its iTunes Music Store and related services, will be cut from the next major release of iTunes, scheduled for sometime this fall. This information comes from anonymous sources close to the company that spoke to AllThingsD.
This timing coincides with the upcoming release of iOS 6. Ping currently still exists in iTunes 10.6.3, the most recent version, and in the iTunes app in the iOS 6 beta, where it reportedly does not work.
Ping was launched in iTunes 10, where it quickly languished, neglected by users and failing to garner much interest - one of the few definite missteps by Apple in recent memory.
Apple CEO Tim Cook admitted that Ping wasn"t working out during last month"s interview at the D10 conference. "We tried Ping, and I think the customer voted and said this isn"t something that I want to put a lot of energy into," Cook said. "Will we kill it? I don"t know; I"ll look at it."
Now it seems that the end is coming sooner than later for Ping. The social features offered by Ping in iTunes and related Apple products will reportedly be replaced with Twitter and Facebook, which is heavily integrated in the upcoming iOS 6.
Source: AllThingsD