Grassroots hackers create file-swapping wireless iPod

Basically it's a wireless-enabled PocketPC with a Rendezvous-based music discovery / sharing program, similar to iTunes' playlist sharing, which uses the iPod as a slave disk drive device. It's kind of like duct taping your VCR and TV remotes together, but it's still a neat concept.

Something like that won't ever get the critical mass needed to have a good chance of running into someone sharing their music while walking down the street, unfortunately. And Apple doesn't seem to want to over-complicate their iPod by putting in a hacked up wireless solution that most people won't be able to figure out.

On the other hand, if someone has a wireless network and is running iTunes with playlist sharing (a fairly common situation right now, I'm running exactly that.) and someone walking by with a wireless iPod could see the shared playlist and tune in to it for a while, it would be all kinds of cool. And wouldn't really make the interface more complicated, they would just show up as another playlist, with maybe a flashing light telling you it's there. They're already inching towards this route with AirTunes though that's a push rather than a pull model.

The two disadvantages to wireless are 1) cost and 2) battery draining. An 802.11b card visibly reduces the running time of a laptop computer. They're getting better though, and it wouldn't run continuously on the iPod, rather it would come on maybe every 30 seconds, check for a wireless signal, and a shared playlist, and turn back off if it doesn't find any. And the cost of components has also gone down quite a bit, and on a $400 iPod it is certainly not an impossible barrier.

This would be most of the way there towards what Cory Doctorow described in Eastern Standard Tribe, only in a handheld form instead of just in a car, and about 30 years ahead of time.