Home Sharing could not be activated because an error occurred (5506).

I am really unhappy about the mess that is appleid and the rigmarole I have had to go through to try and make anything work - which it doesn't from the latest error message to be emitted by iTunes for reasons that don't seem right.

I used to have a working home network which allowed me to share iTunes. I have an AppleTV 2, 2 airport expresses, mac book pro with Mac OSX. I also had Facetime working just before Lion came along. Then everything went to ****. I should also mention I had a me.com id, which might factor into this whole mess as well as an appleid that was tied to a develop id.

It was about this point that my appleid had to be changed to something that looked like an email address, but wasn't - why should the appleid have to look like an email address? But not be allowed to be one? It's just an identifier - it's NOT an email address.

Things seem to keep changing in a way that has no rhyme or reason about it - all hidden from view - slowly, gradually, insideously. Things behave slightly differently, but there is no way to really understand what specific configuration should work and what should not work. Yeah sure I have updated to every latest release of software, but things still don't work, they just don't work in different ways.

So every week or so I come back to trying to recover my once working array of apple gadgets, which are no longer really integrated.

Up until this morning I could actually send music to airport express and apple tv2 - today nothing - the devices did not show up in iTunes. So what changed? I presume iTunes got an update I did not notice this last week. Oh and airports have had issues for a while with dropping connections, especially if you have more than one (as I do). So I brought up the air port utilty and lo and behold there is a software update for it - installed that and it now appears in iTunes (again).

But - the appleTV2 has gone. So back to diagnostics. It seems that home sharing now is now tied to appleid, which I have had huge issues with trying to make work. I used to simply have a convention that the id I used for everything apple was the same, and this just seemed to work. Now it seems I need a real working appelid in order to just use home sharing.

I have never been able to make appleid work. It worked up to the point it had to be changed to be something that looked like an email adrress but wasn't.

I went through several iterations with it trying to get Facetime to work - all to no avail and bascially gave up on it completely. Untill I had to go back to it today to simply try and get home sharing of itunes to work with appletv.

So - I setup a nice new AppleId, created a nice new gmail address, and verified the email address from the Appleid site - so far so good. But of course they are not the same becuase the appleid is not an email adddress - nuts. Then I went back into iTunes and connected iTunes with the nice new AppleID. Then I tried to make home sharing work and got the message in the title of this email.

I have read other posts about this subject that seem to suggest that what I have done should make it work - it doesn't.

And I have not even tried to make Facetime work (again) and iCloud was hopeless when I tried it last - more error messages that did not makes sense despite having done everything "right."

I work with software everyday. Maybe I am just a special case who has had far too many touch points with apple for them to be able to consolidate my relationships with them into a single "appleid" - if this is indeed what is going on here - is it? please tell me.

Apple, I just want to know where you are going with appleid? It seems like someone is making up the rules as they go along and the implementation is piecemeal and haphazard. Every development group is interpreting it in its own way and is not clued in to the vision - if there is one.

I just want all my apple devices and software to work together and to not have to give up my identity to you to make this happen. It's totally unfair to have to provide you with all my personal details (and my credit card) on a web site to just make a few devices work together.

As an appendix to this rant - I tried to ressurect my oringinal attempt at converting my appleid to a pseudo email address - however this ended up in a blind alley because of the need to verify email addresses and gmail's ability to associate multiple email addresses and confabulate certain special characters like "." and "_". The original appleid with some associated email address seems to still be active, however if I try to recover the password by email I never receive it. So Apple (and google) why can't you read the IETF spec for email addresses and implemnted it properly and consistently if you are going to use them for identifiers (a horrible bad idea if youask me).