I’m wading through the legalese and trying out Apple’s all new iTunes 10 to see how their “Social Network for Music”, labelled iTunes Ping works. It’s been dubbed as an improvement to music discovery building upon Apple’s iTunes store.

Dave Winer makes some valid points when he states that Ping is very likely not going to be confined to music, but will open up to all of Apple’s stores, but let’s focus on music discovery, an area I am pretty interested in and have just a couple of days ago submitted some ideas to one of my favourite music services, last.fm (check out my profile here.)

Now I’ve played around with Ping a bit, I must say: challenging last.fm this is not. MySpace, maybe. But only, because MySpace bet on a similar system, as closed platform (although they worked hard to change that, recently) with no way to get data in or out. Ping is the same, only with more constraints. It only runs within iTunes, and one might legitimately ask why that is.

Now, all the pundits say this might be a tool of use only for users heavily invested in their iTunes library. But for those, for the users that have a large library, it is incredibly hard to share recommendations (likes) on ping. They have to search a song or album on the iTunes store to recommend it, or must’ve bought it on iTunes to pop up in the initial “would you like to ‘like’ these albums” screen. Now, the reasonable place to recommend music would be in the music library itself, wouldn’t it? I’m listening to music, I’m enjoying it, let me recommend it to my friends.

Last.fm has a pretty straightforward to do that. You click on the menu bar item, then you click “Love”. There, done, I just loved a song. Compare that to aforementioned process at ping.

Now, User Interface stuff is one thing (and it’s quite surprising that apple got this one so wrong.) The underlying mechanics are quite another.

iTunes ping fails to recognize one basic fact about media consumption, especially music, nowadays. We are not exclusively listening to music on our machines, we’re not exclusively listening to music on our hard-drives. Most of our music lives on the web. That’s what I love about last.fm – it doesn’t really care where I listen to music—they provide the API and anybody can integrate it. This way, all the music I listen to on Spotify (here’s my profile), iTunes or hypemachine (here’s my profile) nicely gets registered at last.fm. Easy.

And here is the kicker—the people I depend the most in discovering do the same thing, too. They listen to new tunes on hypemachine, or even have their blogs feeding in there, listen to stuff all across the web, but ultimately, I find new, interesting stuff by going through the stuff my friends at last.fm listened to the most recently. Because that’s most promising to be interesting to me as well, and very probably is new stuff. I’d love to have this handled better on last.fm, but for now, it’s pretty good already. It’s far better than ping, because it accounts for the realities of my listening habits and those of my friends. We’re on the web, and we hardly use the iTunes store.

And that, really is, what it boils down to. I don’t see this as trouble for last.fm.

PS: my favourite comment on Dave’s post: “I have 184,000+ scrobbles on last.fm Why would I switch to ping?”—I share the sentiment, and applaud that enormous amount of music listened to.