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

Apple’s fated social network is now officially scheduled for shutdown at the end of the month. “After making hints about its future back in May, Apple has announced plans to shut down Ping as of September 30th,” The Next Web reports.

“Ping was announced to great fanfare, but the feature never quite took off,” writes PCWorld.

“You don’t need hindsight to figure out why Ping didn’t work,” reasons AllThingsD. “The most obvious problem with the service was that it didn’t sync up with the world’s most popular social network.

“But now Facebook and Apple have worked out their differences, and there’s no need to keep Ping on life support anymore,” AllThingsD adds.

The loss is no skin off Apple’s back. Essentially admitted failure this summer, Apple CEO Tim Cook said: “We tried Ping and the customer voted … and we said, this isn’t something I want to put a lot of energy into.”

“Apple tried, but it turns out its customers weren’t interested in forming new social connections specifically around iTunes music,” GigaOm writes.

“So what’s next for Apple’s social networking ambitions?” VentureBeat asks. “From the company itself, very little. Instead of creating its own social network … Apple plans to more tightly integrate its devices and operating systems with Twitter and Facebook.”

Writes Engadget: “From here on out, you'll just have to find other avenues to keep tabs on what tunes are playing within your social circles.”