IPod touch Fans

iPod touch Fans is a popular website that is home to one of the largest iPod touch-focused discussion forums, with over 200,000 members and 1 million forum posts. Users can find support for many iPhone and iPod touch-related issues, as well as talk to other touch-screen device users about related issues.

History

Whois records indicate that iPod touch Fans was created by Bobby Georgescu, a student at Stanford University, a few minutes after Steve Jobs' keynote announcing the Apple Inc. iPod touch on . iPod touch Fans appeared as one of the first community websites catering to users of the iPod touch. By allowing users to share and comment on iPod touch and iPhone related modification methods, such as jailbreaking, the iPod touch Fans quickly became one of the leading sites catering to the iPod touch community.

While originally set up as a forum site, iPod touch Fans has evolved into a news portal, often "featuring" posts made by community members, which results in those posts showing up as news on the front page.

As of June 2008, the site is owned by Vigorous Media LLC, a limited liability company set up to protect the site's founder from liability for content posted on the forum by its users.

Currently, iPodTouchFans has almost a quarter of a million members.

Significant member achievements

The iPod touch Fans forum has become a hotbed of iPod touch and iPhone reverse engineering as it attracted more technical users into its large userbase. iPod touch Fans users have made significant advances in the development of third-party modifications for the iPod touch.

Discovery of audio line-input for iPod touch

The discovery of the audio line-in functionality was made by users on the site's forums and received coverage on popular technology sites such as TUAW and Ars Technica. This hardware modification has allowed the iPod touch to be used for voice recording, and more notably for VoIP telephony, despite the fact that the iPod touch was not originally designed for this purpose.

Discovery of TIFF remote jailbreak exploit

On the 11th of October, 2007, a release was posted on the popular "milw0rm" exploit archive linking to instructions posted on the iPod touch Fans forums for exploiting a buffer overflow vulnerability in MobileSafari's handling of TIFF files. The exploit allowed iPod touch and iPhone users to simply browse to a website on the built-in browser and automatically "jailbreak" and install third-party software on their devices.

Torrentula BitTorrent client

On March 3, 2008, a user on the forums released Torrentula, the first (and currently only) native BitTorrent client for the iPod touch and iPhone. The client allows users to download files through BitTorrent directly on their device, without the need for a computer.

Other notable items

Besides its technical contributions, iPod touch Fans has also been the starting point of some interesting news stories.

iPod touch vs. Pickup truck

Originally posted by a member as a thread entitled "My ipod Was Ran Over!", the article was posted to the sites' front page as "iPod touch vs. Pickup truck." From there, the site spread through the blogosphere after being featured by popular tech sites Gizmodo and TUAW.

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