Apple’s recent updates to Ping – it’s social network built into iTunes – actually makes it something of interest, but they are on course to shoot their entire social effort in the foot. From the above product description it’s clear they are presenting this as a social community, but the product they are offering is putting community second behind increased sold downloads.

This mistake isn’t surprising considering they’re beginners in the field of sociality. They’ve built amazingly passionate customers over the last decade by making astoundingly good product, but they passed up every chance to help those customers socialize until 2010. Their Mobile Me product was screaming for profile and sharing features since 2004, but it’s been relegated to a single-user back-up service. iChat, Aperature, Dashboard, Safari all could have had social components added to them that could have done very well. In the last 5 years plenty of services like Scrobbler and SonicLiving used iTunes song plays and artist lists to help people share their musical passions, while Apple didn’t make a single move to make their incredibly popular cross-platform software social in any way.

Now Apple finally added a way to see what your friends like, what they are listening too and a way to talk about it with them. They also did a good job getting bands to make profiles and post updates to them. Good on ‘em! Though this is something you can get most anywhere: last.fm, rdio, pandora (via FB), myspace and many others. I’ve never really found it beneficial to know what my friends and acquitances are listening too via such services because there more noise then signal for my tastes, but cheers to Apple for finally making iTunes social and I’m looking forward to seeing how it evolves.

But for the love of dog why did they have to taint this new product right out of the gate. Increasing cash flow cannot be such a pressing issue, can it? Why squeeze revenue when the community doesn’t even exist yet? At the moment Ping is not a community service, it’s a social sales play. It’s kind of like Groupon w/o the discounted pricing. Whatever it is, it doesn’t feel like a great, trustworthy, beneficial place to share, because at the moment you can’t share a song, radio stream, or podcast that currently isn’t available through their store. Thus users don’t see everything their friends want to share, just the ones Apple can sell to you.

Another example of their trust tainting is that when recent activity is shown in the sidebar, they don’t show ‘friend added a comment’ updates as they do on the full page view, so all one see’s in one’s sidebar is a friend name, a song or album name and a big button with the price to buy it. Also weak is that while they will truncate the name of an artist and song to 5 or 6 characters, they keep the buy button full size. (see screen shot below). I can’t read the artist’s name, but I can pay $24 for their album with one click. That’s not a sharing community, it’s a community exploit.

This might seem like a reasonable shortcoming for a product maker, who can only release so many features at one time, but if they want this to be a widely trusted community service they’re digging themselves a deep hole they’ll have to pull themselves out of.

The reason they are digging themselves a hole is that networks are built on a quickly trustful environment and yet Apple’s Ping is confusing it’s users with a service that conflicts with it’s branding. Without trust, a user will never know if they are being shown everything their friends wanted to show them or what the network provider wanted to show them. For social networks to get hyper-popular it’s important that the trust and benefit are unimpinged upon. The less trust and pleasure, the less virality and the less virality early on requires that much work later. First impressions count with social networks and it’s 5x harder to get an unimpressed user to come back for a second try then it is to get a first-timer to check it out. So by giving the wrong signals early they are making it that much harder on themselves later.

Heather Gold put this flawed attempt at sociality another way. She said “it’s attempting to harvest when nothing’s been planted.”

So, I’m not saying Apple won’t sell a lot of songs, nor am I saying Apple won’t get the community experience right in future versions, but I am saying that this version is tainted which is more then enough to dampen engagement which is all it takes to hold a community service back from being widely popular.

Here’s the side bar I see right now while listening to music. Who is “Jim,” I really have no idea. What album did “Rick” like, I can’t even tell. What’s the most prominent items seen in the whole sidebar? ‘Buy, buy, buy!’