Ping
My Macworld colleague Chris Breen recently wrote about why he thought Ping failed, but I think both he, in that article, and I, in my article just after launch, missed the real reason. Ping was designed to be nothing more than a marketing tool, and it was wrapped within a proprietary application: iTunes on the Mac and iOS. Because of this, when users wanted to interact with others on Ping, they had to use these applications. They couldn’t access them via a web browser, which, in turn, meant they had to “visit a store” to do anything.
