Crashing the Garden Party
by Benjamin Ross
“The cure for iPhone envy. Your iTunes Library on any device. In seconds.”
This bold proclamation appeared mere feet from the entrance to Apple’s flagship store in San Francisco (and directly under its iconic logo) — during Macworld 2009, in June. Apple, reportedly, was not pleased.
The ad introduced doubleTwist, a media browser with a social bent and the latest venture of Jon Lech Johansen (aka “DVD Jon”), who gained fame and acquired his snappy moniker by cracking DVD CSS copy protection when he was still in his teens.
Johansen’s new company — launched in Oslo, Norway, and based in San Francisco — entered the world stage with guns blazing, and got some pretty good media coverage, even though the ad wasn’t up for long. (Speculation suggests the folks at Apple might have taken a hand in that.) doubleTwist has continued its assault on Apple’s iTunes + iPod ‘closed garden’ with billboards in San Francisco and bus banners in New York proclaiming, “Transform your Phone. Your music on any device. In seconds.”
Despite the chutzpah and seeming clarity of the ads, some find it difficult to describe exactly what doubleTwist does. Perhaps most significant, this software application allows Apple’s famous iTunes software to interact with MP3 players made by other companies. For all those who have spent years complaining about the closed garden of iTunes and iPods, doubleTwist provides a ladder over the wall. Your BlackBerry (and hundreds of other devices) may now join the party. doubleTwist users can sync iTunes playlists — or any other media for that matter — to darn near any device on the market. For free.
The doubleTwist software also provides a clean and reasonably intuitive interface for synchronizing media across multiple devices, and if that were all it accomplished, I think it would be worth writing about. But, as you may have guessed, there’s more. The software also provides a social environment for sharing media with friends. If there is a truism for the digital age, it is this: “The more media we have, the more we want to share it.”
doubleTwist accomplishes this through a personal media feed that displays files that a user has sent or received from others. This includes audio, video, and photos. Create a list of friends to easily exchange files. If they have a copy of doubleTwist, the files will show up in their feed. If they don’t, doubleTwist will send an email with a link to each file.
This makes it very easy to do something like share a video podcast episode, for example — a functionality conspicuously absent from iTunes. Instead of hunting down the video file on their hard drive, compressing, attaching, and sending it, with fingers crossed that the 99MB file size will not overload the email account on either end, doubleTwist users click on the video in the program’s browser window, hit the send button, and tell it where to send.
doubleTwist also provides integration with YouTube, Facebook, and Flickr to get new work posted online without bouncing around to different sites and services. And the YouTube hookup also allows videos to be downloaded.
It’s true, most of these individual tasks could be accomplished using other applications. On the Mac, for example, iSync plus The Missing Sync can get a lot of info onto non-Apple devices, iPhoto can send photos to various services or people, and iMovie can get videos to YouTube. But doubleTwist provides a single interface to handle all of these functions smoothly and easily.
In my experience, most people respond to this news in one of two ways. Either, “Holy Crap, that’s amazing! Where did this come from out of the blue and why haven’t I heard of it!” or “So what?” If you’re still reading, we’ll assume you fall into the former category and give you a little history.
In 2002 Don Clark, reporting for the Wall Street Journal, quoted Steve Jobs as saying, “If you legally acquire music, you need to have the right to manage it on all other devices that you own.” In 2006, DVD Jon reportedly pinned that quote to his office wall and, with partner Monique Farantzos, launched a new company aiming to make those words come true.
The latest incarnation of doubleTwist is, in fact, the product’s second coming. Johansen and Farantzos officially announced their venture in late 2006. The program started out as a Windows-only application and was touted for using the reverse engineering of Apple’s FairPlay technology to sync iTunes libraries across various devices.
In an October 2006 interview for CNET, Farantzos, a biophysicist who worked her way into technology, said their company and its software were legal and, just as interestingly, that they had been profitable since day one.
Profitability aside, doubleTwist truly entered the scene in February of 2009. By then it was a Mac-only application, with features rolled out for Mac OS X, and only later for the Windows counterpart. What that says about a company who seems intent on taking Apple head-on, I’m not really sure.
I can tell you that I really hope doubleTwist is a sign of things to come. Version One is certainly far from perfect, with some strange quirks about it (not being able to set a dedicated download folder for received files for instance), but the ideas behind it represent a philosophy that many have voiced and few have found the means to bring about: People should be free to use their media as they see fit.
That is something we could stand to see more of.
