I’m actually surprised that Apple hasn’t had this yet. My reaction was similar to Chris’s – I assumed that Apple hadn’t done it because people weren’t really interested in sharing music this way. If squirting takes off, I’ll eat my words. Perhaps this is the 21st century equivalent of sharing Walkman headphones, but I’m skeptical.

Emma’s comment is interesting: people may prefer not to have a feature than to have one that’s badly implemented or limited. I think this says a lot about how expectations define our interactions with technology. This may be where squirting fails: when we want to share music, we do it Chris’s way – we swap CDs or e-mail each other MP3 files. So, having a greatly limited built-in sharing function contravenes our expectations of how this process works.

People are complaining about the sharing feature because what you get to share is “broken” from the get go. It really matters little that the iPod doesn’t have a similar feature when I can email you a MP3 just as easily from virtually any where in the world… The way I see it, the only thing the Zune offers that I can’t get from my better existing devices/services is that sharing feature. And given that its so thoroughly busted and limited, I’ll stick to emailing or ftp’ing or IM’ing or irc’ing tunes I want to share to my friends. In an increasingly connected world, having that type of device to device limited connectivity to share broken content… well, I just don’t need it.