September has arrived, and that means iTunes 10 has landed as well, complete with a swanky new icon, a streamlined (and mostly colorless) new look and a new social networking feature called Ping. But what exactly is Ping, and does it live up to all of Apple’s hype?

Before you confuse Ping with the name of a Flash Gordon villain, let us explain: Ping works within iTunes 10 (and also from the iTunes app in iOS 4-equipped iPhones and iPod touches) and allows you to follow your favorite artists and friends to discover the music they’re talking about, listening to and downloading. Think of it as the modern version of hanging out at the record store, chatting up other customers and sharing your likes and dislikes -- but now you can do it all without leaving the house (and even while still in your underwear, and you won’t even get arrested).

As excellent as Ping might be for avid social network fans, Apple appears to have stopped just short of making it “awesome” -- but that’s where MacLife.com comes in! Here’s a list of the 10 things that we’d like to see added to the Ping service to make it totally rad. (Do the kids still say that these days?)



1. Three Kinds of Genres is Not Nearly Enough

We’re guessing we weren’t alone in setting up our Ping profile for the first time and being greeted with a huge list of music genres from which to select our favorites, only to discover that Apple has decided we should only have three. (Cue the gong!) Say what?

In our particular case, we would have liked to choose a minimum of 10 genres that we like, which would certainly better represent our scattershot taste in music. (Seriously… it’s kind of all over the place like a freight truck dumping its load on the highway. But we digress…) So come on, Apple, let’s put your heads together and get that one fixed, m’kay?

2. Let Us Pick Top 10 Songs That Aren’t on iTunes

Apple has done a great job of bringing a vast array of music to the iTunes Store, but let’s face it: They don’t have everything. We tried to set up our Ping account earlier today and were immediately discouraged by the fact that we couldn’t select from a wider array of tunes, be it from the Gracenote catalog that Apple uses to pull information from when you import a CD, or better yet, straight from our existing library. After all, that data is right there already, so why not make Ping all-powerful and allow us to tap into it?

3. Pick Music We Like More Intelligently

Another head-scratching moment during our Ping setup came when we saw the music that was selected for us in the Music I Like section when we left the default “Automatically display all music I like, rate, review or purchase” setting on. One would think that Apple would choose to use our own smart playlists -- My Top Rated, for example, or even Top 25 Most Played would be a good choice -- but if you said that, you would be wrong.

We have no idea how iTunes 10 decided to choose our particular Music I Like selections, but suffice it to say that we couldn’t choose “Manually pick the music to display” fast enough. ‘Nuff said.

4. Show The Currently Playing Song

This one really seems like a no-brainer, especially since iChat has had this ability for years: We should be able to show our friends what we’re currently listening to, and have it update as we jump from Lady GaGa to disco and on to blues or what have you. It’s all well and good that we can show ten favorites when we set up our profile, but some of us have… how should we put this? Eclectic tastes, to say the least -- so we might be better represented by what we listen to at any given time, rather than the selections we make when we set up our Ping profile.

5. We’re Not Artists, But We’d Like to Share Like We Are

Have you noticed that the musical artists featured on Ping are all allowed to fancy up their profiles with photos, videos and even text updates, while we lowly iTunes users are simply left to comment on or like them? It would be nice if Apple let us share in the fun, too.

Of course, Cupertino may have good reason to run their Ping shop this way -- maybe they know that people will abuse it and start posting stuff that has nothing to do with music sharing, like LOLcats or babies doing funny things. Heck, even the ability for us to link to favorite music videos would be appreciated (either on iTunes or maybe YouTube) and make us feel less like cattle that’s put here just to consume content. (Which we mostly are anyway.)

6. Share Your Ping Profile with Social Networks

Everyone knows that you pretty much don’t exist if you’re not on Twitter or Facebook, and yet as widespread as sharing information is with those social networks, inexplicably, Ping lacks the ability to do even that simple task. Sure, it’s nice to be able to invite more friends via e-mail, but that’s almost as retro as hanging out in the record store and talking music with the shop owner or other customers -- Ping should be making it easier for us to share our secret love of ‘80s one-hit wonders with the world, don’t you think? Speaking of which...

7. Fix Facebook Connect

If you were playing close attention at Wednesday’s media event, you probably saw Facebook Connect present and accounted for during Steve Jobs’ demo of the new Ping feature in iTunes 10. Yet, after a lengthy wait to actually download the new version that night, Facebook Connect didn't show up for everyone. In fact, it's now nowhere to be found. You didn’t imagine it, and it’s even referenced in the welcome e-mail you receive after signing up -- there just seems to be some debate as to exactly where it went.

All Things D’s Kara Swisher has been on the case after reporting that none other than Phil Schiller himself claimed to be “enthusiastic about finding friends via Facebook” yesterday (according to Engadget) -- while CEO Steve Jobs claimed that Facebook was demanding “onerous terms,” although that appears to be in reference to something more substantial than just Facebook Connect, which is widely used by most everyone these days.

The latest revelation claims that Facebook blocked API access to Ping after it launched, so Apple yanked the feature completely. While Facebook Connect has an open API that doesn't generally require permission, larger services such as iTunes would certainly be an exception, given the infrastructure demands for having 160 million rabid iTunes users all trying to connect to Facebook. Apparently Apple and Facebook are still in negotiations and we'd say you'll certainly see this item scratched off our list soon enough.

Meanwhile, there's a Facebook App page for iTunes Ping -- at the moment it's only 624 people, so swing by and "Like" the page. Maybe they were the lucky -- or unlucky, depending on your view of Facebook -- few to get Facebook Connect working before the door shut. Whatever the case, Facebook Connect has almost become like a digital identification card for the Internet, and its absence from Ping is a real black eye for the launch of iTunes 10. Here’s hoping that all gets worked out and the connection gets made again soon. (Pun intended…)

8. Easier Navigation

Maybe it’s the slimmed-down header bar on iTunes 10 that’s throwing us, but one of our first moments of confusion with Ping came when we jumped into a profile and then, for a moment, were uncertain how to get back to the main Ping screen. Yes, we know, there’s a tiny navigation arrow in the upper left corner of the Ping screen and the right side has a sidebar for My Profile, Recent Activity, My Reviews, People and Featured -- but it’s still not enough for our aging eyes. (We confuse easily.)

In case you’re similarly confounded, the black strip above the Ping screen has a link to jump back to the main Ping screen (or one of the other key areas), which is what we’ve been rocking with so far.

9. Keep Our Reviews a Bit More Private

We don’t have as much of a problem with sharing our reviews and ratings with the outside world (or at least the people we choose to share with via Ping) as we do with the fact that Ping is sharing all of our reviews with other users -- including those we give to App Store purchases. (It’s sort of strange that Apple didn’t limit My Reviews just to music since that’s clearly the domain of Ping, but whatever.)

Be that as it may, My Reviews might be nicer if we could actually do something with it other than see what we’ve reviewed -- if you want to actually review something new, you’ll still be forced to go elsewhere in the iTunes Store to do so. Bummer.

10. Selective Sharing

Our biggest grievance with Ping is that it’s kind of an all or nothing proposition: You either turn it on and share your music tastes with other Ping users or you don’t sign up for it in the first place. We’ve all got guilty pleasures that we cherish more than life itself, but that doesn’t mean that we want everyone to know about every track that we’re buying on iTunes.

Although it seems harmless enough on the surface, teenagers probably won’t want their parents to follow them on Ping (even though they are already familiar with your lousy taste in music after hearing it blasted through your bedroom walls), employees won’t want their employer peeking at their music tastes (unless you’ve got Michael Scott as your boss, and then you have worse things to worry about) and most definitely, you won’t want to share your deep-seated love of explicit hip-hop music with your stuffy old grandma. Sometimes, you just don't want to share everything, so it would be great if Apple could implement some sort of way for us to filter what our friends see, a la Facebook privacy options (but better).


*****

Ping probably isn’t for everyone -- some people are quite content with their taste in music and rightfully squeamish about sharing it with just anyone, be it over fears they will be judged or maybe they just don’t want to be subjected to the tastes of other people (we can’t blame you there). It doesn’t feel like Apple totally hit it out of the gate with this first incarnation of Ping, but give it time: The company learns from its mistakes quickly and we suspect future iterations of the Ping service will right some of these wrongs.

Follow this article’s author, J.R. Bookwalter on Twitter