Several months after the launch of Ping, Apple has to deal with the contrasting feelings of the users of its music-based social network. Despite the efforts made by Cupertino, Ping looks like anything but a true social network. It looks more like a simple rating service aimed at voting and recommending music to those who decide to follow our activity in the iTunes Music Store, which is limited to posting a few comments and little to nothing more.

The social functions available are in fact very limited, using this service is not as immediate as it is for Twitter and Facebook, and it’s not as socially engaging. Indeed, when compared to Zukerberg’s social network, it reminds me of his anonymous music application, whose most exciting feature is to request a “like” to a track.

For Apple, however, each “like” that is expressed has an important weight: it’s like when someone expresses a preference for recommending a product to other potential buyers on e-commerce sites such as Amazon. It is basically a lure to attract more potential customers. And at the end of the day, Ping’s phylosophy, behind its unlikely social-something facade it’s just a functional branch of the iTunes Music Store, useful, more than anything else, to increase sales of songs already purchased by other users through word of mouth.

Just to make things clear, there’s nothing wrong with that, apart from the disappointment of having to do with a service far below the expectations that Apple got us used to: a service you can’t set up even remotely like a substitute for a real “social network for music”.