Apple wants to make Ping work. The music-based social network is struggling to gain traction, and Steve Jobs needs to figure out a way to let people engage with the system and share data with their contacts - all in order to collect more data and drive more clicks to the iTunes Store. It’s a good plan, but it’s not working as expected because Apple hasn’t got the social infrastructure Facebook has. So Steve invited Facebook’s CEO over at dinner to discuss some Ping related stuff including Facebook integration, the Los Angeles Times reports:

They are two of Silicon Valley’s most famous founders: Jobs created the world’s must-have gadgets, Zuckerberg the world’s most popular social networking service. These days they are often mentioned in the same breath. Now apparently the two also recently broke bread.

Apparently Jobs invited Zuckerberg for dinner at his house to talk about Ping two weeks ago. That’s when a tipster spotted them on a stroll in Palo Alto.

As you can remember, Ping initially had Facebook integration. After talking for 18 months with Facebook and not coming to an agreement apparently due to “Facebook’s onerous terms”, Apple implemented a simple Facebook Connect feature that Zuck’s team quickly yanked. Is Steve Jobs doing things old-style now, by inviting people over at his place to break bread together?

It’d be nice to see deeper Facebook integration in the new iLife suite we’ll probably see on Wednesday.