• by Gavin O'Malley , Staff Writer @mp_gavin, June 13, 2012

So, as it turns out, not everything Apple touches turns to gold. Take Ping, the company’s social network for music, which (at least internally) it’s finally calling a failure.

“Rather than continue to maintain Ping, [Apple] is abandoning it and using its partnerships with Twitter and Facebook to make its various software and service offerings social in a way that consumers actually care about,” AllThingsD reports, citing sources.

“People who made music never used ping,” Gizmodo writes. People who listen to music never used Ping. Did anyone at Apple even use Ping? Doubtful, as they might have realized how horrid and superfluous it was, and pulled the plug sometime between its conception and today.”

 “Unlike Apple’s hardware and software products, most of which have been tremendously successful in the last couple of years, the company’s social network has been poorly received from the very beginning,” Mashable writes.

Still, “initial adoption was promising as over 1 million users signed up within the first 48 hours,” AppleInsider reminds us. “But momentum slowed, and it seemed Ping was destined to become yet another Apple side project.”

With the writing on the wall, Apple at one point reportedly contacted Facebook about a possible integration with the social network, but the two couldn’t agree on deal terms.

“The loss of Ping does not, of course, mean that Apple is removing itself from the social media space,” WebProNews notes. “After all, iOS has had OS-level Twitter integration … OS X is getting Twitter integration with Mountain Lion next month, and Facebook will be coming to iOS 6 … in the fall.”