Facebook connect for Ping made a very brief appearance during Steve Jobs’ iTunes 10 demo and some early users were able to catch (and use) it to find friends on Apple’s new social music network. However, a short time later the Facebook integration was missing. What happened?

As it turns out, Apple was indeed having talks with Facebook to integrate the services on an unspecified level. We have to assume the ability to search and find friends as an absolute minimum requirement for the paring of the two companies (though wouldn’t it be great if Apple created its own client that integrated with Facebook and iTunes? Hey, one can dream).

Where Steve apparently ran into trouble was with Facebook having concerns over the volume of users using Ping as Facebook feared it could cause performance issues (hmm.. see 1 million Ping users in 48 hours) and asked for, in Steve’s words:

“Onerous terms that we could not agree to.”

What that means is that Facebook wanted something; too much control, too much say, who knows, but Steve was not happy. Will be see a Facebook Connect feature return in Ping’s future? I am sure we will but it doesn’t look like Apple isn’t having a hard time signing up users in the meantime.

[via All Things D]

iTunes Ping- Where is the Facebook Integration? is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

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