Apple’s Ping debuted on Wednesday with the release of iTunes 10. The social network for music looked pretty impressive during Apple’s Special Event and sent record numbers to the unrelated ping.fm. In practice though, Ping’s had a rough start.

Initially Ping allowed users to use Facebook Connect to find friends that were also using the service, but as of Thursday morning the Facebook connect option was gone. AllthingsD reported that Facebook turned off Apple’s access to the friend finding features in the API due to the high volume of requests. Normally special permission to access this feature is not required, but the load that 160 million iTunes users can put API requires a special deal and preparation.

Now reports are coming out, just the second morning after launch, that the service is already crammed full of spammers. I decided to check out these claims myself, clicked into U2’s profile page and expanded one comment thread:

Four out of the eight visible posts are spam. Michael is very persistant … even after Christine and Juan recommended he go to hell. There seems to be a complete lack of a spam filter at this point. At least there are lots of opportunities to get a free iPhone (Don’t actually try to get a free iPhone this way, it won’t work).

We will see if Apple can get this all ironed out. How are you using Ping? Are you using Ping? What can we expect to hear tomorrow?