Apple Online Store“With each new product that Apple announces, including the revamped Apple TV and the new Ping social network, Steve Jobs reveals a little bit more of his plan to dominate the media universe,” Wade Roush writes for Xconomy. “But I can summarize that plan’s fatal flaw in one word: iTunes.”

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“Don’t get me wrong. I think Apple’s hardware is unbeatable, and my admiration for it has only grown since I got my first iPod back in 2003,” Roush writes. “My home/office is virtually an outpost of the Apple Store: with the exception of the TV, the videogame console, and the coffeemaker, almost every device in my house is an iGadget of some kind. The operating systems that power my Apple devices are pretty good, too. I love OS X and I’m very glad that Xconomy is a mostly Mac shop. On the mobile side… iOS is the slickest and most user-friendly mobile operating system out there.”

“But there’s one piece of the Appleverse that I’ve always detested, and that’s the desktop version of iTunes,” Roush writes. “The ugly duckling of the iFamily, this program is hard to understand, hard to use, inelegant, and ill-behaved—in short, the very opposite of most other Apple products. I dread booting it up every day, yet I can’t sidestep it.”

“I’ve been playing with Ping, and it seems to have most of the features you’d expect of a media-centric social network circa 2010—profiles, friending, news feeds, comments,” Roush writes. “Plus, of course, you can easily preview or buy the songs or albums mentioned in your friends’ news feeds. It’s easy to see how Apple might expand Ping beyond music to facilitate conversations around media of all sorts, including movies, books, and mobile apps.”

Roush writes, “That said, Ping has some serious limitations that, to me, are symptomatic of the larger problems with iTunes. For example, there’s no integration with Facebook or even with your contact lists, so it’s virtually impossible to find real-world friends to connect with. For a social networking tool, this is a bit of a problem… And there’s an even bigger issue: Adding a social networking interface, on top of all of iTunes’ other functions, is like grafting another limb to the forehead of an octopus. It’s just too much.”

There’s much more in the full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: While we agree that Apple has some improvements to make on the less-than-48-hours-old Ping, if you think “it’s just too much,” don’t click the Ping icon in iTunes. “Problem” solved. That goes for any other iTunes features as well. Turn them off or ignore them at will. iTunes can be as simple or as full-featured as you desire.