Apple CEO Steve Jobs unveiled a new music-related social networking service called Ping on Wednesday, and it seems the company intentionally steered away from tying the service into Facebook. Mr. Jobs said his company talked with Facebook about a possible team up, but ultimately wasn’t comfortable with the terms of the deal, according to AllThingsD.
Apple chose not to strike a deal with Facebook because the social networking giant pushed for “onerous terms that we could not agree to,” Mr. Jobs said.
Ping is Apple’s own social networking service targeted at music listeners and tightly integrated with iTunes 10, which the company also introduced at its September 1 media event.
One criticism that’s been leveled at Apple already is that Ping’s closed system should be open so other applications and services can easily tie into it. Apple, however, may not be interested in opening up Ping for branding as well as security reasons.
“Apple’s iTunes has 160 million credit card accounts that it must protect,” an attorney familiar with privacy law told The Mac Observer. “An open API for Ping, without Apple’s privacy policy, would make Apple’s privacy policies thoroughly ineffective, as third parties connecting to Ping would use the private information of iTunes customers as they pleased.”
Regardless of Apple’s motives, it looks like Facebook — and probably any other social network service — will be able to link in to Ping.