iTunes 8 “fire-starter” and digg founder Kevin Rose is at it again, this time on Seesmic, with a couple of new ideas on how Apple could shape up iTunes into an even better media playing app. Rose suggests Apple could add several features to iTunes 9 to make the experience more fun for users and their friends. Rose is basically hinting at a more “social” iTunes 9.

The first thing Rose believes would make perfect sense for the next incarnation of iTunes is a Smart Friends feature, enabled by services like Facebook, MySpace, AIM or even Apple's own services. This new ability would allow users to see what their friends are listening to in real time - a smart playlist-like feature, but with friends. If the friend is listening to something you might like, iTunes will make the suggestion. What do you think? Could Apple consider something like this?

For the office environment, Rose suggests an iTunes Jukebox Live, which would supposedly work based on shared playlists. As most iTunes users should know, if you're on the same network with someone, you can listen to their entire music library, should you enable sharing between the two computers. iTunes Jukebox Live, however, would allows all users in an office to tune in to the same radio stations, or listen to the same track as someone else. Something like this could be achieved by dragging the song into the jukebox, with the song going to the bottom of the queue as “added by” you, Rose suggests. A feature like this would undoubtedly work great at a party, where everyone would throw in a favorite song in the jukebox.

Kevin Rose's suggestions were immediately picked up by music fans and iTunes users, who replied with their own ideas, while also supporting Kevin's. If you have some thoughts of your own on how Apple should treat the next version of iTunes, you can reply to Kevin as well. Drop us a line too, while you're at it.

iTunes 9 Ideas