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Back in September Apple released the new iTunes 10.0.1 version that came with a new music sharing feature called Ping. Since then we’ve had some time to take it for a spin and kind of kick the tires a bit, just to see what we can see.

Ping is Apple’s shot at making a new social network that’s built right into iTunes. With Ping you can follow artists and your friends much like you do with Twitter, but here you get to see their music tastes, album purchases or recommendations, and even concert announcements. All of this is meshed right in with the iTunes music catalog so that you can hear a short demo of a track and buy it with a click. Same thing for albums as well, and for concerts there’s a link to purchase tickets from Live Nation. The interface is something similar to last.fm with a stream on the left of updates from those you follow and further recommendations and options on the right, but Ping’s layout is much less cluttered; in typical Apple fashion it’s pretty minimalist, and oddly soothing.

That’s all well and good, but after playing around with it I’m left wondering why. Why do we need Ping when we have multiple sources for music sharing and discovery already available? Facebook, Twitter, Pandora, last.fm, and yes, even MySpace. Michael Muchmore of PC Mag wrote up a great early hands on for Ping last month and he made an excellent point in that, being an Apple product, Ping is a closed system. There’s no integration with Facebook or Twitter(though there are share buttons for both) so Ping is kind of like a tiny little island social network buried in the corner of iTunes. And that’s another point Muchmore made in that Ping must be used inside iTunes, there is no Ping site to go to.

So that means that the artist selection is going to be somewhat limited, at least for a while. But hey, Lady Gaga’s already there, with followers numbering in the tens of thousands…who could ask for anything more? If you happen to have some friends that don’t use iTunes, well I guess they’re just out of luck. I found several artists and entertainers I chose to follow, such as Stars, Silversun Pickups, and Ellen Degeneres, but only had one friend of mine I could add that was sure used iTunes.

Ping might continue to attract artists and users, but it could be a while. For the time being I feel there are better choices out there for your music discovery needs. That’s my two cents…

What do you think about iTunes Ping? Do you like it?

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