Kara Swisher on Ping’s lack of Facebook integration:

And Facebook is nowhere on Ping, either. Currently, there is no linking, sharing or participation of any kind with Facebook–or Twitter or MySpace–on Ping, which will work only on the iTunes software on computers, iPhones and iPods.

When I asked Jobs about that, he said Apple had indeed held talks with Facebook about a variety of unspecified partnerships related to Ping, but the discussions went nowhere.

The reason, according to Jobs: Facebook wanted “onerous terms that we could not agree to.”

I like Ping a lot. And the lack of Facebook integration is one of the reasons for it. I don’t have a Facebook account and haven’t in about a year. I think their attitude towards privacy is, as Jobs put it, onerous. What it comes down to is their willingness to, on a moments notice, change their privacy policy in a way that negatively effects its users until those users opt-out of whatever crazy new feature Facebook has decided to implement.

Ping on the other hand is much more straightforward with their privacy, more like Twitter. You either have everything open, everything closed, or have everything open to the people you give permission to. I think this simple set of privacy settings is one of the reasons that Twitter is so popular and one of the reasons that I see Ping becoming incredibly popular.

Ping still has quite a way to go in terms of user base. But since it is integrated right into iTunes, I don’t think it’ll take too long. I’m really excited about the idea of seeing what other people with similar music interests like. Music discovery is the one aspect of this move to digital downloads that hasn’t gotten any better. Pandora and Apple’s Genius recommendation system made it better, but Ping’s going to take it to a whole different level.