When Apple figures out social networking, and they will, they’ll make a killing

Back in September 2010 Apple announced to the world that it had launched its own social network called Ping and for the most part the world yawned and went about its business ignoring for the most part Apple’s attempt to socialize your music on iTunes.

Even though they signed up over a million users within the first 48 hours the most you have seen if you ever drop back there is the tumbleweeds blowing through. This has led many a tech pundit to proclaim that Ping is dead and that Apple, like Google, doesn’t understand social media or social networks.

Let me just state unequivocally that they are wrong; but with a slight caveat.

What Apple doesn’t get is the goodie-two-shoes everything-is-free type of social media and social networks as we see with Facebook or Twitter. Apple is not a company that is concerned with anything that is free. They are a company that is in the business of making money and if you think for a moment that they aren’t capable of figuring out how to create a social network that will make them money, and lots of it, then you need to give your head a shake.

Apple hasn’t given up on building a social network and the announcement today that they are patenting a social network for retail stores proves this.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office this week published a new patent application entitled “Social Networking in Shopping Environments.” Discovered by AppleInsider, the proposed invention describes using a portable electronic device, like an iPhone, to allow customers to network with one another while shopping.

In a store, a kiosk would allow customers to access a product list and information on their phone. That product and the details about it could then be shared through Apple’s social networking tool.

via AppleInsider

What people, or rather myopic tech pundits, tend to forget is that Apple doesn’t give two shits about you, me or any other tech oriented user; we’re just a bonus, a way to get free press. What Apple does understand though is the average consumer and they have gotten very rich off of them.

The iPod, iPhone, and the iPad have shown this over and over again. Sure those things are the play toys for geek minded people but that isn’t Apple’s primary market. It is going after the people who don’t know, don’t want to know, and don’t care about technology. These are the people who walk in and buy a product like the iPad because not only is it cool but it is drop dead simple to use.

These are the people who couldn’t care less about rooting a device, let alone caring about what it means. This is the consumer that couldn’t careless about whether something has DRM on it or not. It is the consumer who would rather spend a buck on a song or five bucks for a movie rather than learning about torrents and the such.

They are also the segment of consumer that spend more money in brick and mortar stores than online, or in conjunction to online shopping.

Apple has a very good understanding of this type of consumer, after all they have been selling to them for years, and this is the segment that if Apple can find a way to connect in a social network of their choosing and under their rules … well Apple comes out a winner.

They would be a winner because as much as our tech pundits would like us to believe that the whole world is shopping online the reality is that it still only a small portion of our spending dollars. So for Apple, with their retail knowledge, it might be nice to plan for future online spending explosion but that isn’t where the majority of money is right now.

This means that if they can crack open a social network based around our brick and mortar real world spending – a segment that absolutely no-one else is even looking at, then they can disrupt the marketplace yet again.

And if there is one thing we know about Apple it is that they can most definitely disrupt the market.