Jailbreaking an iPhone constitutes copyright infringement and a DMCA violation, says Apple in comments filed with the Copyright Office as part of the 2009 DMCA triennial rulemaking. This marks the first formal public statement by Apple about its legal stance on iPhone jailbreaking. Apple's iPhone, now the best-selling cellular phone in the U.S., has been designed with restrictions that prevent owners from running applications obtained from sources other than Apple's own iTunes App Store. "Jailbreaking" is the term used for removing these restrictions, thereby liberating your phone from Apple's software "jail." Estimates put the number of iPhone owners who have jailbroken their phones in the hundreds of thousands. As part of the 2009 DMCA rulemaking, EFF has asked the Copyright Office to recognize an exemption to the DMCA to permit jailbreaking in order to allow iPhone owners to use their phones with applications that are not available from Apple's store (e.g., turn-by-turn directions
- Leo Laporte
Well that's a shocker. I am shocked I tell you, shocked!
- Jason Shultz
from twhirl
Hey, there's thing called the DMCA, Apple, which allows jailbreaking on a personal scale. No one's profiting off of this.
- Mike Nayyar
Is it just me, or is this analogous to me buying a DVD player at Best Buy only to find out that it will only play DVDs bought from Best Buy? Or buying a computer with Windows loaded only to find it will only run software purchased from Microsoft?
- FFing Enigma (aka Tina)
When does the non-DMCA version come out with the 30% greater price tag?
- David Knight
I refuse to buy anything that ties me totally into one brand or manufacturer.
- Ian May
I am not a copyright expert, but from my perspective I don't see how this fits into a copyright violation. It could be a breach of contract if the sale "contract" included an express prohibition, but I don't think that it does. Didn't see any fine print that said that anyway.
- Martha
I think Apple needs to be worrying consumer concerns and addressing the motivation for Jailbreaking. Apple needs to remove the asinine restrictions regarding what types of apps can run in the platform,. If they did that, guess what, nobody would have an incentive to Jailbreak. This is the precise behavior that would cause people to look at devices like the Palm Pre. I can make your product better by Jailbreaking, but to do so is a crime. Get a life and a clue Apple.
- Darrell Bell
from twhirl
So glad I don't have an iPhone or any other Apple product. I'm sick of their domineering bullshit.
- Chris, Taskerrific Guy
Give me a "jailbreak" Chris, your ignorance is as pronounced as Microsoft's lack of ingenuity!
- Brad Stolba
I like apple's design, but this kind of atitude has to change. I have an iPhone, and a mac laptop. I guess it's back to Linux for my next devices. I never should have left.
- Don Faulkner
from twhirl
It sure is easy to make your software look like it works slick when you design it to be hardware specific instead of hardware agnostic....
- MVB (Curmudgeon of FF)
It's the domineering bit that sucks. If I buy a phone, and can then only install what YOU determine is ok for it, you can go shove it where the sun don't shine. I'm not anti-apple, just against having the scenario of having to buy and/or use an inferior product that you deem ok, over a superior one that you deem isn't.
- Ian May
I really like Apple products, but other than ipods for me and my family, I don't own any, partially at least because of issues like this. According to legend, Apple Just Works, but isn't it (or shouldn't it be) up to consumers whether they want their stuff to Just Work, or to assume the risk of messing around with it themselves? Apple should just say, if you jailbreak your iphone, you void the warranty, and too bad for you if something breaks.
- Steve Lowe
How do you know its Apple? The exemption was unlocking phones for the sole purpose of legally connecting to another wireless provider is OK. Even if the comments were filed to the DMCA by Apple, it could certainly be because of pressure from AT&T.
- Mona Nomura
I don't care either, I don't have i anything here anyway,.. hardware or software.
- Ian May
Reason #NaN why I don't care that much for the iPhone...
- Tyson Key
This should increase sales. I'm serious.
- Bwana ☠
Just curious, are all the iPhone nay-sayers against the iPhone because of Apple? Or because of the hardware? There is no phone that beats the iPhone and Apple's overall UX in the current market. Aside from QiK, why would you need to Jailbreak anyway? The stock utility apps suffice.
- Mona Nomura
I'm not against the iPhone as such.I'm just more than happy with my Blackberry. I wouldn't want AT&T as my provider though. The stock utility apps might well suffice, but that's not really the answer, as many people want the ability to try alternatives. Having that option blocked by draconian measures isn't really cool at all. It's about choice.
- Ian May
My iPhone has been incredibly buggy since jailbreaking it. Found I'm not using video as much as I had planned so I'm constantly thinking more and more about restoring it. Thinking about it though, it does bother me that they want to enforce this. I like being able to choose whether I want a buggy phone or not.
- Robert DeBord
Mona, the reasons to jailbreak are decreasing, but there are still benefits such as UI customization, video recording (Cycorder) and further camera enhancements (Snapture, ClearCam). Personally, I know I could get by without jailbreaking so this isn't a big deal to me, but I'm not surprised by the reaction. It's pretty much the same deal as Hackintoshes (which is in court now), but on cell phones.
- Bwana ☠
Same here Robert, I had planned on restoring mine in the near future. This announcement is a kick in the pants to do it :)
- Bwana ☠
Ian - the app store provides more than enough choices...
- Mona Nomura
The past few days, some have argued the app store has TOO MANY choices :P
- Bwana ☠
Yes Mona, but without jailbreaking you can't install pirated apps ;)
- Robert DeBord
And Robert has stated the real reason behind this. Apple was fine with everything until the pirates came along. Always ruin everything, I'm telling ya. :)
- Bwana ☠
Apple's entire business model is predicated on the closed nature of the platform. If you want an open platform, you get a Windows Mobile phone. Or a G1. That said, the App store is huge!!!!!! And I agree with Mona.
- Roberto Bonini
Mona, as I don't have an iPhone I don't know much about the app store, but I also understand there's some kind of convoluting process for writers to get apps in the store? As yet, there's no BB apps store, but I can pretty much install any JRE app in any case.
- Ian May
Ian, if a 14 year old kid can get an app on the app store and make money, anyone who's serious about it can
- Bwana ☠
Don't forget how much free time a 14 year old has. And oh, every article about some crackerjack 6 yr old who published an iPhone fails to mention the CTO developer parent behind the scenes :p
- Ari Braginsky
Still, the point remains.. it's not hard to get an application on the app store. It's hard if you break the rules however. (See: Qik, Ustream, anyone who steps on AT&T's precious bandwidth)
- Bwana ☠
Bwana, you have a point. As I said above, I'm only repeating what I heard, as I have no personal experience with the iPhone or the store.
- Ian May
This is very much a clash of cultures. Those who, historically, don't use apple products are used to self determination when it comes to technology - they're the ones using it, why can't they decide what they do with it? Why *should* you have to use the apps store if you don't want to? What if the app store doesn't provide something you want? Or doesn't provide it well enough.. where do you go?
- alphaxion
Can a 14 year old fill out tax forms and submit the $100 developer application with a credit card? I know I know, just pointing out some of the hurdles that aren't really brought up much. The provisioning and certificate hoops you go through is a pain at first but once you do it the first time it's not bad.
- Ari Braginsky
I love the apps and the only reason I have seen thus far to jailbreak is to get turn by turn directions on my iPhone's gps. But, I currently am content to wait until the offer it above the table.
- Martha
You know what they should do next to really drive home their point? Sue some single mother for $250,000!
- Geoff Schultz
@Geoff - You missed one vital step. Sue dead people, and elderly people who don't own computers.
- Tyson Key
This is why I advocate Symbian OS, and anything that's not an iPhone...
- Tyson Key
Maybe it's me but WiFi is so accessible tethering isn't an issue. Apps are becoming more cloud sourced / web based, being hung up on native apps and local storage is backwards thinking.
- Mona Nomura
It's too early to pitch for Palm Pre Mona :)
- Bwana ☠
@mona ownership of data is *never* backwards thinking... it's the thing that concerns me the most about people trying to push the decades old cloud agenda and is something that is totally overlooked until it's too late. Why do you think corporations have been rejecting the notion that storing all of your data and applications with a 3rd party without having your own infrastructure for the past 3 or 4 decades?
- alphaxion
And WinMo as well as Symbian - from what I hear. People may have doubts about the cloud but I can not be more excited for the day we no longer have to worry about data synching / transferring. Just back-up, back-up, back-up.
- Mona Nomura
personally I will always maintain my own infrastructure and will always own my own data. Stuff I do in the cloud will always be just sharing it with others, should anything happen to those entities my stuff will always be safe.
- alphaxion
I've been saying this since CES. Pre may not be "the" handset but I am certainly excited for Nova. And alphaxion: exactly. Back-up and take precautionary measures to fit your individual needs.
- Mona Nomura
I'd rather have a phone with an open platform where I know that I can extract all my data from it, install whatever software I want, or tether it to a computer without having to worry about a gatekeeper, even if it doesn't have a "slick" GUI and a load of bravado and drooling fans surrounding it, for what it's worth...
- Tyson Key
If it doesn't let you move and copy contacts, calendar entries. entire mailboxes/folders full of messages, and install software to a removable memory card, so that it can be backed-up as many times as necessary, it's not worth it, in my opinion.
- Tyson Key
@Mona - I'm also looking forward to seeing the Pre/Nova. Any idea about which versions of Android contain those features, out of interest? I can't remember the version shipping with the emulator containing them, last time I tried it, although I know that I'm able to do that sort of stuff with the phone I have now, and a copy of FExplorer. (There's also a "Back-up" option in the Memory card application that copies everything to a seemingly proprietary .arc file on the card).
- Tyson Key
Another thing that sucks about the iPhone - No OBEX.
- Tyson Key
@Ari - Thanks for pointing me towards the Archive Team site. It looks like an interesting project, and I'm tempted to see what they're up to.
- Tyson Key
Interesting to see that a FriendFeed Archiver is already kicking around at http://github.com/lmorcha.... I just hope that I never have to use it more than once.
- Tyson Key
No problem. They're looking for quality contributors too.
- Ari Braginsky
What is this Nova cellphone that some of you speak of?
- Darrell Bell
@Darrell - Nova was the codename/working name for Palm's WebOS Linux-based platform used on the Pre smartphone.
- Tyson Key
@ Whiners. I want the coolest hand-held device that works. All this other jail-breaking, complaining and Apple-hating can be solved in a second. Don't buy one. Shut up and go with Android, but don't surf the net, it's been hacked. Wait for the Pre, and wait. Meanwhile no cash flow for Palm, not a penny, while we WAIT. Clunky click a Storm. Be happy. Just quit yer bitchin'
- Phil Boiarski
I didn't say that I hated it, just that it had a number of flaws that reduce it's utility to me. I still think that it's an interesting and novel product, as far as technology and the software stack itself goes, though.
- Tyson Key
This really opens up more market share for the HTC Dream aka T-mobile G1. Think about it, it's open source. You can't beat that, apple.
- Carlos
@Phil that sounds amazingly like what can be said about windows haters. amazing!
- Jason Shultz
from twhirl
while, I agree that it's stupid and *maybe a little self-destructive - I would have to say, @Carlos, that Apple actually is handily beating the G1... :)
- felix
There is no perfect phone, and there probably won't be one, but we can still try...
- Tyson Key
@Tyson // Thanks for the clarification
- Darrell Bell
@Darrell - No problem, glad that I could clear that up for you.
- Tyson Key
some of the things that apple does to its user base, are almost as incredible as what its user base puts up with.
- J. Abdul-Qahhar
Bullshit Apple, bullshit. But... I have a iPod Touch and Apple don't say that I can't jailbreak that :P
- Kristian Salonen
Don't have to worry. I don't buy apple crap.
- Stephan Miller
Good luck on that one. Jailbreak! I stillhave my BB Pearl though, so I can't talk.
- John McElhenney 2.0
Carlos - I bought a G1 2 days ago and, while its not as polished as my iPhone, being able to do what the hell I want is great. There's a good post over in the Android room about that browser issue too
- Jeffrey Canton
I bought it, I can do anything I want to it.
- PC Easy
from twhirl
Not really understanding why all the Apple hatred here. As well as research, and running legitimate apps not approved by apple, Jailbreaking lets people run Pirate copies of apps from the app store. Some software companies are seeing as many as 2/3 of the copies being pirate instances running on jailbroken phones. This suggests to me that the majority of jailbreaking is being done to enable people to avoid paying for the Apps from the store, not to run the innocent apps that haven't been enabled by Apple.
- Robin Barooah
Let's not forget that Apple has actually enabled a whole group of independent and creative people to make a living from creating interesting mobile software, and that jailbreaking is harming these people far more than it is harming Apple directly. (http://tinyurl.com/bxaws3) (http://tinyurl.com/akfpy5)
- Robin Barooah
I agree with apple, and normally I wouldn't jailbreak it, but I'm needing copy/paste, tethering and video recording so i do it, apple get those things out, and won't consider jailbreaking again. i know there is this mess with people pirating apps using jailbreak. But I don't support that, i buy my apps.
- Edgar Rodríguez
from twhirl
I'd guess that Apple are not really concerned about using the DMCA to stop people, but are more worried that the EFF might have some success in forcing them to 'open' the platform. Perhaps they are positioning themselves at one end of the spectrum so that they have room for compromise.
- Robin Barooah
breakin' th' law breakin' th' law breakin' th' law breakin' th' law breakin' th' law breakin' th' law breakin' th' law breakin' th' law breakin' th' law breakin' th' law breakin' th' law breakin' th' law breakin' th' law breakin' th' law breakin' th' law breakin' th' law breakin' th' law breakin' th' law breakin' th' law breakin' th' law
- thegeniusfiles
You're doing it wrong #2. Learn how to use lists. You followed 310 people. That's too many and you shouldn't follow so many if you want a quiet life. Solution? Lists! Put your favorite people into one called "my favorite people." Put noisy assholes like me into another. Etc. Etc. Eventually you'll have a very useful system. But first learn how "friend of a friend" works. You probably will like life better if you turn it off for a while.
- Robert Scoble
Interesting. I just went through the "Wizard" at the beginning of the sign up project and in imported folks from lord knows where.
- Scott Hanselman
Scott: that's the problem with our current mentality. We think more=better. Not really true in this case. Luckily there are solutions!
- Robert Scoble
Thanks. I've tossed all but 80 or so friends, turned off friend of friend, made a room and I'll watch from here! :)
- Scott Hanselman
I would have just moved all the others over to a list and watched it to see who adds value to your life. Same thing with me. Watch http://www.friendfeed.com/scoblei... to see if I'm adding any value with my Likes. That's what'll show up in friend-of-a-friend stuff anyway (which you can still get to, even though you turned it off: it is at the bottom of your page in a "show hidden items" link).
- Robert Scoble
Hiding tons of stuff helps make Friendfeed managable, but the "Best Of" feature doesn't respect it. The Best Of view would probably be the best part of Friendfeed if it weren't full of FOAF pictures of their cats.
- Jon Galloway
One of the nice parts about have "friends of friends" show up is that this way I learn about interesting people I want to Subscribe to. If they have an interesting post that or comment, I'll check their feed, see if there's content I'd like to subscribe to and if so I will.
- Loren Heiny
You followed too many people and haven't yet put them into lists. Start with me. Start a new list (link is over on left side over there). Name it "Noisy Assholes." Now click on my account and put me over there and remove me from your home feed.
- Robert Scoble
I only have 'my stuff' in home - Everyone else is in 'Following' and other such lists, Scoble gets an exception and goes in the OPML list :P
- Stephen Edgar
"This tutorial will be broken down into several different parts to serve as a reference highlighting various features of WPF and C# programming."
- Adam Kinney
from Bookmarklet
"One of the biggest stories in gaming this year was the ugly DRM enforcement that accompanied the release of EA's Spore. Will Wright's long-awaited life simulation was marred by a disgraceful DRM debacle that led to one of the most significant online protest campaigns ever started by gamers. The message was clear: gamers did not like SecuROM and, more generally, DRM. Perhaps in an effort to win back PC gamers, EA has now made its big 2008 titles available on Steam without third-party DRM."
- Kol Tregaskes
from Bookmarklet
I saw this last week. I'm considering getting Mass Effect once I'm done with Fallout 3.
- Alan Le
too bad they are all georetarted, which means I can't buy them :(
- Rahul Das
It seems the quality level here has gone down as people try to move up the FFholic page. If this continues I will change who I subscribe to. I want to have items that make me smarter, not more entertained.
Guess you will have to unsubscribe from me then :)
- Alex Scoble
That's a bit harsh and demanding but then again you don't subscribe to me anyway
- Toby Graham
@Greybeard: It's not harsh at all. If I think someone's not giving me quality, I will completely hide them from sight.
- Ben Parr
I think I want a little of both, plus collaboration and friendships. Just me, though. :P
- Neal Jansons
from twhirl
I suddenly feel like I'm being lectured. I'm sure that wasn't your intent, but, that's funny anyway.
- Yolanda
Agreed. FF is getting simultaneously rancorous and "fluffy". Rabid political attacks alternating with endless pix of kittens peeking out of teapots. I can live without both.
- Sprague D
we're not all here for the same reasons...
- Internet's Tad
I think intelligent conversations are going to stem from topics that look at the larger picture. What are some of those that you'd want to talk about?
- Patricia
It sounds a bit harsh, it does, but aye kin see if ye only use FF for smarts and whatnot
- Rahsheen ™, Coach of FF
For once Robert, you and I are in complete agreement. I have yet to even look at FFHolic and I doubt that I ever will.
- Aaron Krug
I feel sorry for anyone who can live without kittens. ;) Odd, how people tell me similar things when I say I'm Agnostic.
- Alex Scoble
Robert, I think now is a good time to start using the FF beta list feature. You can move the people that post mostly entertainment off your main feed and into a "fun" list.
- Alan Le
Robert, I'm with Yolanda and find this a little harsh. Sorry that FF is not up to your liking (maybe its to others though??) but if you reading/receiving posts you don't like then it's completely up to you if you wish to hide/unsubscribe that post/person. And you can easily create your own friends list. A little confused, sorry.
- Kol Tregaskes
from twhirl
greybeard: anyone who links to the BBC doesn't have to worry. Subscribed! Yolanda: I +was+ lecturing! :-) Alex: if the shoe fits. I like noise, but there was an increase in the noise force and if that is the way it will be I will look toward people providing good stuff that makes me smarter. I don't watch Entertainment Tonight for a reason.
- Robert Scoble
i looked at ffholic once, chuckled, moved on. ranking people is worthless imho. truly worthless. creates frustration, envy, and reinforces the worst attributes of people.
- Jeremy Toeman
I second being sick of kitties in teapots, as well as all other trite imagery and obvious Photoshopping. I try to hide it as much as possible and I definitely don't add any more fluff like that.
- Kamilah Gill
Kol: it was harsh for a reason. Life is harsh. Ask an NYC trader.
- Robert Scoble
I don't know that FFholic is really in the back of most folks' minds. What I do expect is that you are starting to see cliques evolve even more so, and that some cliques are ones you and I would rather not be in. That's a natural evolution.
- Louis Gray
I think the problem has less to do with FFholic and more to do with the lame "talk like an idiot" day(s).
- Nathaniel Payne
I like FF, I think it's a good mix of tech and fun...I think you just gotta pair down your follow list and you'll be fine...But with popularity comes the populous so short of setting up your own closed invite-only environment, there's not much you can do here but fish or cut bait...
- Live4Emma (L4S)
Louis: understood. I will start using lists more like Alan suggests
- Robert Scoble
Well, I think you pegged it a long time ago, Robert... You are defined by who you follow... so is your feed... if you don't like what its (or you) have become, time to make some changes. Fortunately FF makes it easy to do so. :)
- Her Lindsay-ness
Obviously I touched a nerve here. That is interesting too.
- Robert Scoble
I actually don't believe in subscribing to 200+ people, although clearly that expands my reach and the positive affirmation I could get here. So, in being selective, I tend not to blame the community for content that doesn't interest me, but rather my own selections. How does that logic grab you?
- Marko Bon
from fftogo
Platy: that is why I say you are defined not by who follows you but who you follow. Obviously I am about to redefine myself.
- Robert Scoble
Robert, life might be harsh, but this is just FriendFeed, not life. ;-)
- Kol Tregaskes
from twhirl
Marko, completely agree, hence why I'm confused with Robert's comments. Just cut down on your friends or create a friends list with the people you want to read. And, as a bonus, click Hide. ;-) Robert, how do you read through FF?
- Kol Tregaskes
from twhirl
Do you only watch one type of TV show? One genre of movie? Talk about only one topic, ever? Most likely not. I like FF because it is so diverse and dynamic. And the perfect solution as you stated would be using the lists, if you feel certain people ONLY dish out one type of thing. Since most don't, you will probably miss out on a bunch of stuff, which may be your goal in the first place :)
- Josh Haley
Josh, if Robert does, then he should subscribe to one type of FFer. :-)
- Kol Tregaskes
I find myself atop the list; dunno why, don't care if I stay there. I comment and share as I will, as I am. That means humour, intelligent discussion, a simple agreement, disagreement, word of support, or a semi-rare rant. That means being myself and letting the subscriptions take care of themselves. I tend to subscribe to people who do so similarly. FFeed is what you make it.
- Michael W. May
I can understand the logic, but I don't agree. The site is called "FriendFeed" not "LectureSmartFeed." While it's nice to have educating information on here, it's also nice to be entertained by interesting stories that I wouldn't have found otherwise. I see the site more as a pool of information both educational and entertaining.
- James Ferguson
Haley. I like a little variety, even noise. But when I refresh and see nothing but I know something changed in the force. I refresh FF hundreds of times a day.
- Robert Scoble
On the mark. Entertainment is good but being smarter / more in touch is best.
- David Z
@theposterformerlyknownasAlexScoble, I love cats. I live with 2 of them. All the more reason I don't need a steady stream of pukey-cute kitties & doggies to look at. I seriously wish more folks had gotten a little more art education so they'd have a better idea which images are really worth bothering with...
- Kamilah Gill
Variety is the spice of life, Robert. No, wait FF is not life or is it? ;-)
- Kol Tregaskes
Robert, have you tried friends lists? I would suggest this is the simple answer.
- Kol Tregaskes
I agree: this is aggregation aggravation
- Anna Camara
Honestly FFHolic is not getting that many visitors. So being on the list wouldn't impress a lot of people. Also, we didn't create the lists to make people compete with each other but to let people outside the blogging community to see what the buzz of the day is.
- Baris Seker
The problem might get worse now that you mentioned FFholic, Robert. I bet there were still a few folks who hadn't heard of it yet.
- Kamilah Gill
You do need a bit of chill-out time from all this tech posts. Robert, are you just after tech-news?
- Kol Tregaskes
Robert Scoble - Friendfeed software needs to be smart enough to automatically restructure and optimize to your interests in real time your social networks and personal information flow. Imagine when 10 billion people are using a program like Friendfeed. Only the most minute percentage of communications is going to be of interest to each of us. No one using Google Reader would complain about the availability of too many feeds -- you simply select to follow those feeds that are most interesting.
- Sean McBride
Hey, if you don't know FFholic, you're not an early adopter. :)
- Sean McBride
Kol: you can see what I like here: http://friendfeed.com/scoblei... -- yeah, tech heavy, but I go for anything that makes me a smarter person. Cat photos? Hardly ever. That's my brother's job and I just typically hide them unless they are only the best of the best.
- Robert Scoble
I "like" what I want and don't expect others to feel the same way. I also hate seeing politics flooding my FF, but haven't griped about it (before now). And I've never heard of FFHolic. But that's the hit or miss of FF, I guess. Some really awesome random stuff that one would like can pop up, but also the not so really interesting bits too.
- Arlan Koizumi
I don't mean to offend...I respect you and everything you talk about/share with us...but can you take a quick look at this and maybe share your opinion?
- David Cook
As much as I like the "you are who you follow" argument, to Robert's point, look at who are the most active people on FriendFeed. Look at what the most popular stories are. Regardless of who you follow, you're not going to avoid what everyone on FriendFeed is liking, commenting on, and posting.
- Mark Trapp
Was that a threat, Robert? I think it is funny that there is so much bitching about FriendFeed being too much about social media and techies.. and now that people are beginning to use it for entertainment.. there's a problem :) That being said, you should begin using lists, or just unsubscribe from those whose content you don't like... but you'll probably have to turn off foaf as well, if you don't want any entertainment at all... or just go back to google reader!
- Tim Hoeck
@Mark Trapp have you been using lists in beta to filter the material you're seeing? If so, do you find that it's been effective?
- Mark Wilson
It's only a threat if people see some value in me following them. I doubt they do. Anyway, I am starting to use rooms. With 3,000 it's a bit tough to categorize everyone, but I'm working on it.
- Robert Scoble
Mark, I have been using the lists to filter out people who give me stuff I don't care about, and I've turned of Friend-of-a-Friend. Even then, people who I want to follow because I like them and they are interesting are also interested in things that I don't care about. People have diverging tastes, and the really popular memes are almost universal: look how long it took for Bacon to die out. Unless you don't subscribe to anyone, the "rethink your subscriptions" cliché doesn't solve the problem.
- Mark Trapp
This is the first time this post has actually made it to my FF page 1 today, which speaks to how busy FF is today. I've not yet read the comments above, however I will say that I think it's rather presumptuous to assume that people are trying to move up the FFholic page. Many of us were surprised at the results, and at least one person has decided to take a FF hiatus due to the results on that page....
- FFing Enigma (aka Tina)
Hey, maybe Robert can call for a Serious-Chatter-Only Corporate Version complete with his special personal wish-list of features, and it can win TC next year. What a hoot!
- abacab
... It's been said many *many* times over that the wider the audience on any social site gets, the broader the interests get. FF is no exception. Options are to either subscribe to a narrow interest niche or a broad variety of people. It's a personal preference, and if you're looking for nothing but intellectualism I would venture that you'll have to look harder and harder for it as more and more people join.
- FFing Enigma (aka Tina)
kol: actually, the time I spend here is life and if FF continues in the direction of a bored high school study hall, I'll spend a lot less of my life here than I do now.
- Bill Sanders
I mentioned earlier today that I was surprised I was so far down the list (but then Robert pointed out that I was ahead of him which made me realize how much time I actually spend on FF). I know that a lot of my posts are fluff. I don't care what people think of me but I'll be honest and admit that having Robert subscribed to me works in my advantage. I'm sure that at least some of my subscribers have come to my feed because of Robert.
- Mark Wilson
I don't care what people think of me but I do like making connections with as many people as possible. A narrow mind and narrow field of subscriptions doesn't make the experience any richer.
- Mark Wilson
What you use FF for is different from what someone else uses it for. Again, I see value in things great and small, from a simple chuckle to deep debate.
- Lindsey is Fierce!
Praying that this fixes my broken Live Photo Gallery (though maybe the Nikon NEF update that craters it)
- Dennis E. Hamilton
from twhirl
I really am keen to see the new Messenger, Live Writer, and the Movie thingie, despite taking the opportunity to tease you.
- Dennis E. Hamilton
from twhirl
There are significant differences between SUP and the Six Apart update stream: (1) SUP documents are fixed length. SUP clients periodically poll the server for new updates. Six Apart streams updates to the client. (2) SUP documents contain opaque feed identifiers. Six Apart sends a stream of Atom feed entries.
- Gary Burd
SUP can also be used to monitor for updates on any URL regardless of content-type using the X-SUP-ID HTTP header. You are correct though that it's essentially a compact, standardized, generalized, discoverable form of an update feed.
- Paul Buchheit
As SUP is basically a "service-to-service" behind the scene protocol, streamed version with persistent connections seems to be more interesting. Also, SixApart streams contain the actual data and stream consumer does not need to fetch individual feeds.
- Alex Kapranoff
Alex, streamed is less efficient because it delivers data that I don't care about, has privacy problems (what would Google Reader Shared Items stream?), and is much more complex to implement (try doing it in PHP on shared hosting).
- Paul Buchheit
The first and the second things you mention are problems of the SixApart implementation which is not a standard of some unchangeable kind. One can easily add filtering to the Atom Stream protocol and probably do something with the secret URLs. Implementation for small shared hosting based sites is, on the other side, nearly impossible, yes. But why a small site would want to implement SUP? As far as I can see it should be interesting for moderately big services with thousands of feeds.
- Alex Kapranoff
How do you propose that Google Reader should implement this Atom streaming in such a way that it would preserve feed privacy? My PHP on shard hosting example is somewhat extreme, but PHP is actually very popular, as is Rails, which I think would also have some difficulty managing endless streams of updates. The SUP design is very much line with how everything else on the web works so that it can be implemented everywhere -- endless streams of Atom data are unique to a single site I believe.
- Paul Buchheit
I don't see how abstracting the username by a layer is going to help privacy. It should be up to the feed publishers on how to handle privacy. They can and should offer better privacy controls than an abstraction. Based on what i've read about this so far, I could easily write a script to crawl flickr or twitter and get every single users id and link it to their SUP-ID. I put it on a different comment, but maybe a POLL verb for http would work.
- Shawn McCollum
Shawn, The id abstraction prevents crawlers from discovering the URLs of private feeds using information in the SUP feed.
- Gary Burd
Private feeds shouldn't be in the SUP Feed at all. Obfuscation as a security or privacy model doesn't prevent, it just delays the inevitable. The SUP protocol isn't going to be universally accepted and no matter what, your going to have to support feeds the current way. Handle private feeds normally since without authentication it's really just hidden not private. I like the way FF allows you to regenerate your api key, something like that should be used for private feeds rather then a id and password.
- Shawn McCollum
But Shawn; the SUP ID in the private feed means nothing unless you know the feed it belongs to. And if you know the feed it belongs to then you deserve to know it (ie someone registered it with you). Private feeds and SUP get along just fine. I suppose you could add another layer on top by generating a unique SUP id for each feed for each client. So the SUP id only means something to the client who requested it. But that's a lot more work for the server generating the SUP feed.
- Benjamin Golub
Shawn, the advantage of SUP is that private feeds can still be protected by whatever mechanism you choose (such as the FriendFeed remote key), but still feed update information into a public SUP feed because the SUP-ID is completely opaque. (you can't discover the SUP-ID unless you already have access to the feed)
- Paul Buchheit
another thought - why re-invent? Did they look at www.sitemaps.org?
- Dave Hodson
It doesn't mean nothing, it mean that there is something you don't know. I can do alot with "knowing I don't know something".
- Shawn McCollum
I think the SUP-ID concept is interesting but over architecting a solution for a small subset of the issue your trying to solve. It's nice that SUP-ID works to limit the size and help with private feeds. You could also implement something like the base html tag for size. Then either separate private and public updates with the private ones using SUP-ID or use a marker to identify that the backend needs to go through an extra hoop on this one.
- Shawn McCollum
"It doesn't mean nothing, it mean that there is something you don't know. I can do alot with "knowing I don't know something"." Fill your SUP feed with random bogus SUP ids and bogus data. Then there will be *a lot* you don't know (including how many accounts the service *actually* has).
- Benjamin Golub
Shawn, can you give an example of something you could do, knowing that an unknown feed within OurDoings was updated at a specific time? I don't see the vulnerability here. This is a real question as I already implemented SUP.
- Bruce Lewis
from fftogo
Just so everyone knows, I'm not trolling and I love friendfeed. I have personal not professional interest in speeding up feed aggregation. Just chatting so... Loading up random data will have a negative effect on the size feature of SUP and will cause more processing to be done by the consumer of the feed. Bruce, I'll put something down to answer your question in a bit, but right now i've got to pick up my son from daycare.
- Shawn McCollum
It's funny you mention Netflix personalized feeds indirectly in your blog post, Dare, as I'm not sure a basic SUP feed would work help much for our feeds. The personalized Netflix feeds generate generate about 6 million posts per day (about 2M each of queue adds, shipped DVDs and received DVDs). Given that any given feed consumer is likely only interested in a small fraction of the 8.4M+ subscribers, the signal-to-nose ratio in a SUP feed would be quite low, unless you created a SUP feed per consumer.
- Michael Hart
Michael, SUP is intended for large feed consumers, not people monitoring one or two feeds. If you are doing 6 million feed updates per day, and your SUP feed compresses to about 8 bytes/entry (as the FriendFeed SUP does), then that works out to about 555 bytes/second (or 33k/minute). A compressed netflix feed appears to be about 22k, so the breakeven point is around 2000 feed fetches / day. For clients who poll feeds every half hour, that is only 45 unique feeds. For those that poll 1000s, it's a big win.
- Paul Buchheit
Of course the math is different with if-modified-since, but from what I can tell netflix does not currently support that. Also, if you want to be a little more clever, the size of the SUP could be reduced substantially by only including info on feeds that have ever been fetched, since the majority of netflix feeds have never been accessed. You can also have separate SUP feeds for queue...
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- Paul Buchheit
And of course that's just the bandwidth savings. Using SUP would also reduce feed latency and the overall number of requests.
- Paul Buchheit
Paul, drop me an email and we can take this discussion offline. We have some interesting feed improvements on the way in the very short term including ETag-based cache control and programmatic feed access behind OAuth to get rid of the copy/paste nonsense. You can reach me at mhart at netflix dot com
- Michael Hart
It doesn't go far enough for me in terms of granularity. I'd like a way to decouple feed page sizes from updates, so you can know exactly the entries that are updated/new, not just the feeds. This would be fantastic for mobile apps. Right now it's about asking endpoints to support a 'since' parameter on the feed. I wonder if X-SUP-ID will go through mobile networks- what they do sometimes with HTTP is 'interesting'.
- Bill de hÓra
But is it really fluent or all stuttery like here in Japan? I understand that their server infrastructure is based in the US, but the whole concept of the browser (streaming video) seems not too suitable for many phones out today...
- Michael Leuker
it can be a bit flaky at times also depends on the horsepower on your mobile
- Jas Sandhu
Requires Silverlight (like the olympics) and the Move player for HD.
- Alan Le
Awesome! Thanks for the link - FYI Mac users : I had to use Safari - didn't work in Firefox.
- Steve Isaacs
Makes me wish Silverligjt ran on Mobile Safari on my touch.
- Roberto Bonini
First the Olympics, now the DNC. Man, Microsoft knows how to put out carrots to get people to adopt its proprietary technologies. Can you say "hoodwinked"?
- Chris Messina
hoodwinked? But is there an open alternative technology for viewing HD video on the web backed by a CMS system that can handle the load of the DNC viewers?
- Alan Le
@chris why do you say ""hoodwinked" - maybe just maybe that it is best out there ?
- Peter Dawson
Can anyone explain why the Move component is required for this? It seems like Silverlight's adaptive streaming would be adequate...
- Wade Dorrell
@wade I'm not sure on the specifics for the Move component but I see that jon galloway commented about it here: http://friendfeed.com/e...
- Alan Le
Mona, poster names are still links they're just styled differently so they don't look like the other links.
- FFing Enigma (aka Tina)
beta.friendfeed is my new friend !! lots of new stuff to play with.. 8-10hrs lag with list data ..but a very very powerful feature. !! Way to GO TEAM FF !!
- Peter Dawson
Love it. If this does not go mainstream, I don't know what will.
- Vinay | विनय
OK: That's a long enough beta period. Let's do it live!
- Chris Baskind
I want to start a pool -- (a) first blog to hit techmeme with an article on the re-design, (b) blog with most articles about the re-design (within 2 days starting now)
- Wayne Schulz
Michael: if you're viewing your feed from the main address, there is a 'sharing' box up at the top, and the options (comment, photo, link) appear once you begin typing.
- FFing Enigma (aka Tina)
click on your name Jennifer, above right
- Tibor Holoda
@Jennifer "My Feed" in the sidebar replaces the "me" tab. And like Tibor said, your name works too.
- Dan Hsiao
you launch this right after takeoff from scoble to berlin - coinkydink? :)
- Allen Stern
@Stupid Blogger: Thanks, I'd figured that out, was just pointing out what seems like a bug in the current UI.
- Michael Nielsen
Looks nice on first glance, and it seems easier now to reach rooms. The friend lists should be a great way to organize my imaginary friends which are basically topic subscriptions. The "Add/ Remove friends" link is confusing at first because when you don't have any friends in the list yet, clicking it will result in nothing (making you wonder if it's broken). The message sharing post...
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- Philipp Lenssen
I love the new info bubble. Super better than the old one :)
- AJ Batac
Looks like the logo now clicks to the Friends view, as you'd expect. Same as You + Friends.
- Chris Baskind
can't seem to access the beta site: Service Unavailable We encountered an error on your last request. Our service is new, and we are just working out the kinks. We apologize for the inconvenience.
- Thomas Hawk
Awesomeness, very useful, and solves the biggest problem of noise reduction! great!
- Aditya Kothadiya
awesome! Working now. Anyone know if there is a pagerization greasemonkey script yet for the beta site?
- Thomas Hawk
thanks for the iteration.. it's a great step forward
- Travis Parsons
like the new functions, but not the new layout, it just doesn't look like friendfeed and a bit feel like google groups (caused by the side bar maybe). miss the old layout...
- Baron M.
We need a "remove from home feed" button under the friends settings. Or there must be an option that we can choose the list which shows on main page. For example, i want to see only "Professional" friends' feeds on the main page.
- Selim Yoruk
So many small details and improvements, make SO much difference.
- Martin Añazco
At last, I will be able to add to my feed all the people who subscribe to me, and it won't impact on my main source of infobrainment. It looks nice, too. Looks like you guys have pulled another one out of the bag. +1
- Slippy "Threadsbane" Lane
I'm truly amazed at how good the UI is. The subtle touches like the use of blue links in just the right places or the contextual help like "How does hiding work?". Really great job. I think mioNews just became a little less useful to me, since FF now natively has friend groups. Oh well :P
- Patrick Lightbody
It has a great feature in allowing me to separate different people into different lists - that will be worth the whole interface change in itself. I hope that rooms also have embeddable feeds tho!
- Justin Long
FF is in a frenzy. This is 16 hrs old and 3rd on my Best of the Week. Congratulations Bret and team.
- Russellreno
@Marcos: you can hover your mouse over the comment bubble in front of a comment to get its timestamp.
- Dan Hsiao