[chrischen]

Even if they do ease in scrobbling their "social network" will be crippled by the fact that your Winamp buddy, or Rdio friend, or Linux pal doesn't use iTunes. For Ping to succeed they're going to have to convince users that their platform is dedicated to social music, not enhancing the itunes purchasing experience. So unless iTunes gets every music listener in the world, or darn close to everyone, to use iTunes instead of however they currently listen to music, then their social functionality is going to always be less useful than a platform independent service. A social network gains value with more users (in general), so if iTunes is restricting the flow of potential users it's just going to hurt them.

iTunes could satisfy the iTunes user market. But unless clusters of friends all use iTunes, a decentralized service will be more useful. And i'm not sure if being an itunes user means more of your friends use itunes (to any level of significancy). So chances are most people will have a bunch of friends who can't participate.