Frienditto is Back

If you don't know anything about Frienditto (http://www.frienditto.com), they're this self-proclaimed archiving tool that makes it extremely easy to copy other people's posts to "LiveJournals" (a certain blogging software hosting gobs of journals at livejournal.com).

They went down not long after opening up shop, and now they're back, and claiming to archive craigslist posts in addition to livejournal posts. I go to their main "entries" page, though, and I see nothing new, though, and no craigslist archives.

The thing is, they claim to be an archival tool, but they're don't actually seem to be one. If they were, they'd have some actual functionality for archiving. But they don't.

Suppose I want to mirror my livejournal site, so, every time I post to my livejournal, I archive the post via Frienditto - which is inefficient as hell, but suppose I do it anyway. There's no easy way to get to that "archived" post later. This screams to anyone who'll listen that the purpose of this software is not for you, the owner of the journal, to archive your journal. It's for something else. It's for someone else to make a copy of your journal post for some temporary purpose. Not even a permanent one in the sense of keeping something that *they* can access easily later, which the "memories" tool of LiveJournal provides (it works much like setting a bookmark with your browser, and you could always -- hey, get a load of this -- set a bookmark with your browser if you were so inclined), because the same lack of methods to get to that "archived" post later applies no matter who submits the post for "archiving".

The purpose seems to be for someone else to copy your stuff in real time to another location (on the frienditto server) where you can't touch it. In order to, say, poke fun at you on fandom_wank or LJ drama, which people actually do (see http://www.ljdrama.org, and, for a brief history of fandom_wank, try http://versaphile.com/wank/ [*]) and in such a way that you can't make your post go away, or edit it, or anything, because you don't have control over that copy.

And control, over copies, of your work, is kind of the essence of copyright, friends and neighbors.

There's nothing new in Frienditto's legal policy and terms of service, it's still the same "cleverness" I commented on in the following posts:

Clever Girl

Clever Girl, Part II

[*] "fen" is the plural of "fan", as in, a fan of a TV show, or actor, etc.