Part of my job is downloading the latest nonsense from the InterWeb in order to stay current. This behaviour is, to an outside observer, indistinguishable from what is usually called playing, but never mind, someone has to do it. This kind of play is not without its risks of course. You start off with high hopes, reading about something on a blog somewhere. You download it, with only the barest idea of what it will do for you, and hand over valuable personal information. Then you have to install some obscure elements of the Microsoft .NET framework, or a new version of QuickTime, or some other irritating applet. Each update requires a further update, until you’ve forgotten what application you were trying to install and you give up in disgust.

When you’ve finally got the damn thing up and running it’s incredibly buggy and takes ages to load, and then hangs, and crashes your computer three times in a row. It makes calls on your browser, and then hangs your browser. It messes weirdly with Outlook. Pretty soon you’re sweating as you watch all the data on your hard drive being erased. You call the teenagers in IT and swear blind that you were away from your desk when it happened, and slowly and carefully they reinstall all your data and applications, muttering softly about irresponsible users.

So imagine my surprise when installing doubleTwist to discover that most of these things didn’t happen. The basic idea is that it’s hard to exchange music, pictures, movies, and other digital candy with your friends because of incompatible file formats and the hassle of transferring large files. It’s particularly hard to exchange iTunes music files, because Apple’s DRM prevents you from doing so. In doubleTwist, Apple’s DRM is stripped out of the files in your iTunes library, and you sync your media with a bunch of different portable devices, and exchange them with your mates. The good people of doubleTwist want to “liberate” our media, which sounds good to me.

I install doubleTwist with a minimum of fuss and am presented with a friendly-looking application that gives me a list of my digital assets on the left-hand side, and three big buttons indicating different modes: Home, Share, and Sync. I can see a list of all my digital candy: pictures, video, and iTunes. It also prompts me for my Facebook login. I consider the security implications of handing ‘DVD Jon’, famous for defeating the best-laid security defences of major corporations, the keys to my Facebook account, and ponder a bleak future of identity theft, bankruptcy, and homelessness. But what the hey, you only live once, and some VCs have given him money for this thing and they even have press releases on their website, so it’s probably totally fine. I enter my Facebook ID.

I select some songs I’ve purchased from iTunes, and doubleTwist nobly announces that it’s liberating them from the horrors of Apple’s DRM (It will only do this for songs you’ve legally purchased.) It seems to take a long time, and later research online confirms that this is because it’s playing the song in real-time and then re-encoding it as an MP3 file. You can do this yourself by burning the songs to CD, so it’s not exactly rocket science, but I think DRM is for the most part foolish and ill-advised, so I enjoy this feature. However, it annoys me that I can’t easily see where the cracked iTunes files are – I can sync them and share, but not access them easily. I guess DVD Jon doesn’t want to look too piratical now he has VC backing.

Then I get a shock. I click over to the Friends tab and see the names of everyone I know. I am momentarily perplexed, but then of course remember that doubleTwist has inhaled my friend list from Facebook and is representing them in its own livery. This is sort of trippy, because it’s as though I’ve methodically invited all of these people into my doubleTwist world, when of course my doubleTwist world is entirely new. I feel a bit embarrassed, as though suddenly everyone I know is staring at me while I illegally share files. The Friends stuff is quite elegant, even pulling in their pictures, and in a strange way it invest the whole application with more weight. It seem much more substantial now my friends are in it, even if they aren’t aware of it.

I manage to sync some liberated iTunes song with my Archos portable media device, which means I’ve actually done something with doubleTwist that is useful to me: I can copy these files from my Archos on to my computer at home, which means I’ll be able to play these songs on my Sonos system, which doesn’t currently support iTunes music. This means that I can’t listen to music that I’ve bought and paid for from the Apple store through loudspeakers, only through headphones, because of Apple’s annoying intransigence and dull DRM politics.

However, this is a fringe benefit. It’s time to test the actual file sharing. I go over to a colleague and explain that I am about to send him an MP3 file via doubleTwist. This is simplicity itself: I click on the Share tab, and then drag the file over. Then I drag a colleague’s avatar over and click the Share button. I ping him to check if he’s received it, expecting, naively, a link that enables him to download the file to appear on his Facebook account. It doesn’t. What appears is a notification in his Facebook message list telling that in order to receive the file he needs to download this cool new application, doubleTwist. Next day I ask if he did. He says, “It was late…”

For of course, one man’s viral application is another man’s annoying spamware. I didn’t actually want to enmesh my mate in my private hell. I just wanted to send him a music file. If I send someone a link to a Google doc, they don’t need to download anything. They just get a link to a webpage. Next day I beg and plead and get my colleague to install doubleTwist. He does, but during the install discovers he needs to load a whole bunch of Microsoft software. We like that the load screen says; “Now installing Microsoft software components. This will take forever.” It does take ages. Then he has to do an e-mail opt-in. Then it takes ages to log into Facebook because he’s, like, a rilly popular guy with a million friends. Finally he’s in but he hasn’t received the files. Hmm. Ten minutes later I check and he’s received them. He plays the music file, which sounds fine.

So far, so good. I try to send a movie file, but it won’t let me send anything longer than ten minutes: good enough for viral videos and no major movie studio will be suing any time soon. This is Beta software, and I’m just one dumb user, so don’t take my word for it: go check out doubleTwist yourself. What struck me about it was the power of importing Facebook into other applications. We think of Facebook as a platform that supports other applications, but in doubleTwist it becomes a component within an application. Your social capital in Facebook is imported into doubleTwist, in the same way that you import any other address book. I’ve struggled with Facebook sometimes, but the idea of one having one social network in which you can unite the power of multiple applications is a smart one.

It doesn’t matter whether these are applications that run on Facebook, or applications which import Facebook’s social networking mojo. Those Facebook APIs work both ways. I’m much more likely to invest social capital in Facebook if I can then re-invest that capital in the next new cool app, simply by entering my Facebook name and password. Who knows if doubleTwist will make it: but I’m now convinced that other applications will find ways to double the value of Facebook with the same sort of twist. Facebook sign-ups may be falling, but that’s only because everyone and his dog has an account. I think this thing will run and run.

---

Michael Parsons, now Editorial Director, Consumer Media, for CNET Networks UK, spent five years working in Silicon Valley and worrying about technology. He can be reached at michael.parsons@cnet.com

Explore Personal Tech

• InGear