2009 February | William Hook

Where DRM works (and I don’t mind it):

Software activation on stuff like Windows. It’s never gotten in the way for me, and nor for anyone else who’s legitimately purchased their copy. It doesn’t work all that well, since there’s pretty much a crack out within days of the software’s release, but for the consumer, it’s fine.
DVDs and Blu-ray Discs. It still doesn’t work, since it’s cracked so easily, but it doesn’t get in the way of the average consumer. I can lend my copy of The Dark Knight to 100 people, and it will still work on their player and mine.

Where DRM does NOT work and is a huge failure:

Music. Why should I pay £7.99 for something that I can get for about £1 extra in a store, which doesn’t have DRM, has physical media as well as cover art, can be ripped in a lossless format, and allows me to play it on any device out there? I shouldn’t. DRM on music is even more stupid when you consider you can get lossless music off bittorrent, and save yourself £7.99 in the process. Oh, and since the iTunes Music Store has gone DRM-free, I’ve actually started purchasing music off it.
DVDs and Blu-ray Discs. Yes, I already said I don’t mind it, but seriously? Why even bother putting DRM on BDs? Slysoft have cracked the uncrackable BD+ protection within months of it coming out. And it does harm the average consumer too – I’m sure many people have purchased a BD drive only to find that the discs won’t play because their monitor doesn’t support HDCP…so why even put it on there in the first place?
Games. The new form of product activation on games like Spore…well, it doesn’t work. Why? Because pretty much every game released in the past year WITH this form of protection has been cracked within a week. In fact, with Spore, it was cracked and released about two days before the release of the game itself. So, again, it doesn’t work and all it does is get in the way.

So, DRM sucks. The end. And for the record, I downloaded Spore and tried it out. It sucked. Still, on the upside, I saved myself £30 and got a DRM-free copy that I can use whenever I want and as many times as I want.

Social networks. First, it was MySpace, now there’s a social network for pretty much everything. Facebook, Twitter, Plurk, WordPress, Brightkite, and god knows how many more.

Then came “Ping.fm”. One site that allows you to update your status message on ALL these sites no matter where you are, and from a single website. Pretty neat. So, last night’s release of the Twitter client “Twhirl” interested me, because v0.9 has built in Ping.fm support. Meaning, I could use Twhirl to post to Twitter, and then get those updates pushed to Facebook, Plurk, and Brightkite – which are the three sites I use the most.

However, after thinking about it…no. If I do it that way, it works when I’m on a PC, but if I tweet from my iPhone while I’m out and about, I generally use Twitterrifc for that, and that doesn’t post to Ping.fm. Since I would have now had to disable Facebook from grabbing my status updates from Twitter, that means if I tweeted from my iPhone, Facebook wouldn’t get updated.

I’ve gone back to Twitterrific since then, but herein lies the problem. If I was to switch to using Ping.fm full time, I want an application for updating it on both my PC and iPhone. There’s Twhirl for PC/Mac, and “Pringle” for the iPhone, but I find them both….ugly. Twhirl not so much, but both apps, compared to Twitterrific on both platforms, are ugly. Plus there are other annoyances…if I update my location in Brightkite the way I had it setup originally/now, that update is pushed to Twitter, and then from Twitter to Facebook. Using the other method, it would only be pushed to Twitter. And not Facebook.

So, until someone can design an app that can 1) have both desktop and iPhone clients that look pretty and work well, 2) update everything at once, no matter what, and 3) has no annoying quirks that I dislike…well…I’m sticking to Twitterrific.

I think, overall, Ping.fm works well, but it doesn’t work well enough for my liking yet. Oh, and if you want to follow me, do so on Twitter. I’m most active on there then anywhere else. Followed closely by Facebook.