As I was going through my Google Reader feeds, hitting the “share” link I got to wondering: “Wouldn’t it be cool if there was a similar ‘share’ link for iPods?”.

Here’s how tune sharing would work

There would be a setting in iTunes along the lines of “Share starred track info” or possibly “Share tracks above <n> stars”.  As I’m listening to an interesting podcast, I’d use the “star” feature on the iPod or iTunes to mark the track for sharing.  Information about the starred tracks would be sent to Apple and added to my RSS feed of shared tracks which would probably reside on some Apple website.

My friends and followers could add my shared tracks to their RSS readers and check out my favorite tracks.  I’m sure some web 2.0 company will jump on this and make an iTunes shared track to twitter bridge.

Beyond text feeds

The feed could simply be added to someone’s text based RSS reader if they only wanted to know “Kyle liked Talk of the Nation on 1/28” but it could also be turned into a subscribeable podcast feed of it’s own.  Think of the benefits this would provide:

• The subscriber of the shared feed wouldn’t have to listen to every episode of a podcast.  The sharer essentially becomes a content filter.
• The subscriber would be introduced to new content of similar interest.
• Apple could easily place a “Buy” link in the feed for non-free content.  $
• And of course, let’s not forget, Apple would receive a LOT of invaluable market data.

I’m usually pro-competition but in this case Apple has most of the infrastructure already in place to pull this off with very little effort and they have a lot to gain.