John Benson dot com

This weekend brought some much needed rain on Saturday followed by 80 degrees and sun for Sunday afternoon. What a perfect time to clean off the deck, crack a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc and fire up the grill. The only thing missing is music, right?

One of the few gripes about the iPad last year was it’s inability to access my entire music library wirelessly. It made little sense that I should be able to push music from my iPad to the Airport Express but not push music to my iPad. This resulted in a couple emails to Steve about this logical hole in iOS.

The solution came a few weeks ago with version 4.3 of iOS. If you haven’t already done so, activate home sharing in iTunes on whatever machine holds all of your music. Pick up your iPad, fire up the iPod application and look in the top left corner.

Now you can access your whole music collection, including that rare Grateful Dead set from Filmore East, that choice version of Porch Song by Widespread Panic From 2001 or whatever else fits your fancy.

Happy spring, everybody. After this winter, we all need it.

The ability to download your Facebook profile was originally announced in October of last year and is now available for all individual users. There have been quite a few hyperbolic articles declaring this to be a “boon for e-discovery in the cloud.” While I don’t necessarily see it as that, it certainly does make preservation and collection of information from Facebook much easier.

How it Works

When you log into Facebook, find your account settings and click on “Learn More.” You’ll be prompted to enter your account password again, and then will see a message indicating that they will email you when it’s ready. If you’re clever, you probably filter messages from Facebook out of your inbox, so make sure to watch for the email. They must not store the download for very long once it’s prepared because it took me three tries to successfully download the file once it was done. There isn’t any error saying that the download had expired, which is kind of a pain.

The download comes down as a collection of HTML files, images and a stylesheet. It’s very well done, and you could actually just post this directory to your own webserver if you’d like.1

E-Discovery Implications

While I haven’t had a chance to see the output from a corporate account or organizational page, I would imagine that the process is very much the same. If this is the case, then when a duty to preserve information in anticipation of litigation arrises then it’s probably a good idea to have the admin of a company Facebook page initiate the download.2

Since the duty to preserve is an ongoing one, regular archives should be made since the data on a Facebook page is pretty fluid. One downside for those who may have to review this content prior to production is that de-duplication through the use of MD5 or SHA-1 checksums will be ineffective since all messages and wall postings come down as a single file.

Things I Thought I’d Never Say

Back when I joined Facebook back in early 2005, I was a pretty big supporter. I liked how it was clean, unobtrusive and showed no signs of allowing the customization which was one of the contributing factors to the decline of MySpace. I also really appreciated how it was private, as did many of the initial users. As the service continued to grow, I lost interest and really only maintain my account now because as an alpha-geek in the legal community I have to talk about Facebook a lot.

Facebook did something very right with this from a number of perspectives. Web based services like Facebook, Basecamp, Salesforce.com and Google Docs are going to continue to grow and users (and their lawyers) need ways to get to this information outside the browser. Even if a magic wand were waved where we could easily do pure native document productions, dynamic web pages like a Facebook profile are still extremely problematic. The only way that the Facebook download profile format could be more friendly to your average lawyer would be if it came down as a series of tiff images with a database load file.

Hopefully the same model of exporting flat, non-interactive versions of dynamic webpages will spread to other services soon.

For the very first Thing of the Week, I’d like to present Microsoft Windows. Up until 2006 I was a pretty devoted fan of the folks up in Redmond. I can still remember watching my dad expound the awesomeness that was Excel running on our Zeos 486DX powered machine. My time on the computer was spent more in things like Where in the World is Carmen San Diego and Project Neptune (at one point I could definitely 10 key faster than I could type), but fiddling with Windows 3.11 was how I really learned how computers worked.

How much do you want DOSSHELL on your Windows XP box?