Some good ideas. I don't use an ipod, I either listen wirelessly on a WiFi headset, or burn MP3's to listen to in my car. But, having a background in PDA's and Smartphones, a key function is the ability to beam data from one device to another. Practically, if you used a technology with a high speed, low power consumption interface, beaming MP3's or other formats would be great. Of course video requires even greater bandwidth, so other than cables (who wants to carry cables), it's not that pratical.

I'm spending a lot of time listening to and understanding the world of Podcasts. The vast majority are free, but device level data sharing has commercial drawbacks.

Firstly even if your only motive for producing a podcast was to have people listen to it, if a high percentage of listeners got it virally rather than through iTunes or somewhere else, you wouldn't know how many people had access. A few doesn't matter, but if its a hot podcast and loads of people were sharing it, you could give up in disappointment without knowing your transmission was popular. Podcast servers obviously count downloads.

As a recording artist, I can claim royalties against podcast downloads if I can quantify them, even if they are free.

Many people producing podcasts are now including ads as a revenue source. Obviously these are also based on number of downloads. Even producing and hosting podcasts can be costly, so it is fair for those who need it, or want it (if they offer value) to have a way of generating revenue from them.

Thus my argument is that whilst I love the idea, without an audit trail (which would be pretty much impossible) and given that iTunes is there to make money, it is unlikely that they will make it easy for ipod to ipod file sharing. imho:)

Saying that the ipod is poorly designed because it doesn't do social networking is like saying that my OXO Good Grips vegetable peeler is poorly designed because it doesn't cut my carrots into matchsticks for me. It might be excellent if it did, but that's not what it was designed for. If I want matchsticks, I pull out my French mandoline, a necessarily more complicated (and blood-thirsty) contraption.