Is iTunes 9 A Social Tool?

I was in the air for the Apple announcements today, but looking at the various screenshots and commentary Apple has drastically reworked iTunes. But I had been wondering, in advance of this event, would Apple really transform iTunes into a truly social experience for media, something on a par with what Last.fm did years ago?

Jobs was back, and made a series of announcements — ringtones don’t move me that much — and my interest was piqued when I saw that the new iTunes 9 will all sharing across up to five computers within a home (by home, I guess they mean connected on the same local network). But how does this work? It looks more like an automated sync capability, where a single iTunes Store account is the pool for all purchases, and these automatically are distributed to the various home PCs.

Note that this is not going to help with sharing ripped music or music and media from other sources, so it is in no way a general solution to shared media.

There seems to be a growing awarenees of the idea of sharing information about music and media in a more general way, such as posting to Facebook and Twitter, although I have no idea at present what the tweets or Facebook updates look like: I am betting just a link back to the iTunes page.

So that’s not much of a much, really.

I was hoping for personal commentary, my notes on that Kings Of Leon track, for example, accessible to those who want to follow me on iTunes, like a MOG. But Apple is steering away from become a streaming or social application, providing just the most minimal of social experiences, proxied by Facebook and Twitter. Disappointing.

[Update: 12:23 MT — Jason Kincaid jogged my memory about the rumored social playlist, which was not apparently included in iTunes 9.]