Ping is Apple’s recent move! Not to mention, almost all of the Apple fans are crazy about it already! Ping, as the Apple fans say is a mixture of Twitter and Facebook into music. Let me make it clear. With Ping you can follow your favourite celebrities, find out what your friends are listening to, cast a vote and so on. You can also get artist updates via an activity stream. In short, it is a social network for music. Some say that it is social+commerce. Apple is trying to enhance the iTunes store by adding a social networking layer to it!

Everything is fine. But there seems to be a big issue. Ping is not available everywhere. Their service is available only in 23 countries, 23 being a small number. Given that Last.FM and MySpace are available in most countries in the world, this is really a setback. Apple seems to do this because it wants to tie Ping closely to the music store.

Let me tell you how two awesome features of Ping will suffer because of this constraint -

1. Ping has a cool option to buy a song directly from a status update. What will be the use of this cool social feature if Ping is not available in my country? See how disappointed I will be when I click my friend’s update to buy a song to see the message that the service is unavailable in my country?

2. Another awesome feature of Ping is browse popular or trending music albums/songs and then buy them. Again, this feature will not serve the purpose if the service is unavailable for specific countries.

Given this, many people feel that they’d rather stick with Last.FM or MySpace instead of going for a service that has not many features available at their country. We all know that Facebook tops social networking media and if it decides to offer music, it sure can draw the whole world towards itself. That would be an easy game, but Facebook should really take the initiative, is a question which Mark Zuckerberg should think.

Apple acquired Lala, an online music service, for implementing social capability with music. Lala is a standalone company which used the social sharing and have succeeded driving peeps towards paid music downloads. Leaving this drawback aside, Apple’s fans boast that this is Apple’s first attempt at combining social networking and music store. They hope that Apple will surely improve after hearing feedback from its customers. They say, “Facebook has had years to perfect its model and to work its way into most countries around the world. That capability, success and popularity didn’t happen overnight“.

There is as usual a combination of voices; some appreciate the launch and some say it sucks. It could be Apple’s ingenious marketing strategy to make people wait for something when they are increasing craze among the crowd for a particular service. Let’s see how people will embrace this release of Apple. After all, the social component with, will guarantee increased sales.