Will Ping work? It's the question of the moment.

Personally I don't care. Much as I like my friends, I don't give a fig for the musical taste of most of them.

Not that some of them won't potentially have one or two recommendations I might be interested in. It's just the density of those successes compared to how quickly I can find new music myself, or by talking to the three or four friends whose taste I already know I like, makes the whole thing a waste of time.

Indeed, with only one million of a potential 150+ million iTunes accounts currently signed up to Ping, not to mention Apple's disagreement with Facebook, it suggests this might be a social invention that's already going the same way as Google's Wave.

Ping not Pong

And taking a broader view, surely the one conclusion to draw from the implosion of MySpace as social glue is that while many people are passionate about music, it's an oft changing culture, perhaps only really dominant for teenagers expanding from school friends to the longer lasting ties of adulthood via slippery groups of emo, postpunk, goth or grime. Even music only works as a crystallisation point for a couple of years. 

Conversely then, Facebook works because it lets us make multifaceted connections - everyone from relatives to friends, acquaintances and friends of friends. Our hobbies and interests slot in as subsets.

And that's why regardless of Ping's eventual (or not) success as a music network, it will never work for games and apps. People just don't identity with emphera such as games in the same way as they do with their favourite bands, let alone their actual (or imaginary) friends. 

Or considered another way, think about how social games works.

They only took off in the context of Facebook, which provided the framework to allow a group of friends to play the same game at the same time. These people don't play lots of games either - maybe two or three a year - so the recommendation of new games is fairly meaningless for them. 

The unity dilemma

It's a similar thing with any online game, whether persistent or multiplayer. Social activity is generally based around one title at a time, with the inertia of a group leaving that game for something new increasing over time.

Which is why even games that do work as social glue (and they're aren't many) aren't useful discovery channels. 

This has been proved by the likes of OpenFeint, Scoreloop and Plus+. They function well in terms of providing abstract leaderboards and achievements, but in the case of OpenFeint with its 30 million users, it doesn't possess sufficient granularity to be a real social platform or drive sales. 

To be honest, I even have my doubts Apple's Game Center will crack the situation.

I should be able to find my iOS gaming friends of course, and be able to compare my scores with theirs etc. But as an unified system, it's promoting the entire App Store, not specific titles.

In addition, when it comes to create a social network, I think it's far more likely that the majority of Game Center's multiplayer activity will be used finding random people to play against, rather than encouraging friends to have the same game and them being available at the same time.

The bottomline is gamers are social but neither social enough or a large enough as a group to make gaming a key social adhesive.

And either way, the only recommendation systems that have been proved to work on the App Store are based around price manipulation, not social interactions.