A meeting between two chief executives that comprises many people's fantasy dinner party reportedly took place recently. The L.A. Times is reporting that two weeks ago, Apple's Steve Jobs and Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg had a meal together at Jobs' Palo Alto home to discuss Ping.
The two CEOs were spotted walking and talking together in Palo Alto. Details of the meeting are based off of speculation, but sources think that Jobs might be trying to charm Zuckerberg into some kind of compromise after previous negotiations concerning Ping and Facebook had reached an impasse.
A Business Insider story said Facebook and Apple had previously spent more than 18 months in discussion over a partnership through Ping, Apple's social-networking music service inside iTunes. Apple wanted to integrate Ping into Zuckerberg's site via Facebook Connect. But they couldn't broker a deal; Jobs said in a BoomTown report that Facebook had "onerous terms that we could not agree to." There is no official report as to what those terms were, but when Apple tried to use Facebook Connect without an agreement, the social-networking site blocked API access.
Ping launched at the beginning of September, signaling Apple's entrance into the social-networking game. It's a service that allows users to "follow" different artists and see what music their friends are listening to.
"It's sort of like Facebook and Twitter meet iTunes," Jobs said in an AFP report.
Ping already has more than a million users in 23 countries. A partnership with Facebook could help boost iPod and iTunes sales.Neither party has commented on the meeting.
For more details, see PCMag's hands on with Ping.