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"After making hints about its future back in May, Apple has announced plans to shut down Ping as of September 30th via a notice in its iTunes 10.7 update, reports Mark Gurman at 9to5Mac.\r\n\r\nWhen asked at the All Things D conference if he would kill off the music-based social network, Cook said \u201Csome customers love it, but there\u2019s not a huge number that do, so will we kill it? I don\u2019t know. I\u2019ll look at it.\u201D\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\u201CWe tried Ping and the customer voted,&amp;quot;\u00A0Cook continued,\u00A0&amp;quot;and we said, this isn\u2019t something I want to put a lot of energy into.&amp;quot;\r\n\r\n&amp;quot;Apple doesn\u2019t have to own a social network, if that\u2019s the heart of your question. But does Apple need to be social? Yes. But the ways that we express that today are integrating Twitter into iOS, and you\u2019ll see us integrate Twitter into Mac OS with Mountain Lion. Some people think of iMessage as social.&amp;quot;\r\n\r\nThe expanded look at iTunes 11 today showed much more integration with Facebook and Twitter as well as enhancements to discoverability and browsing for both music and apps.\r\n\r\nImage Credit:\u00A0Toby Oxborrow"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://thenextweb.com/apple/2012/09/13/apple-shuttering-failed-social-music-network-ping-september-30th/>