Full BitTorrent support, offline sharing coming to AllPeers
By Eric Bangeman | Published: July 25, 2007 - 11:09PM CT
When it was unveiled last year, AllPeers promised to make private file-sharing a snap via a Firefox extension. The premise is simple: users download an extension and can share any file privately, securely, and efficiently via P2P. AllPeers has just added another twist to its product—full support for BitTorrent.
Although AllPeers has used the BitTorrent protocol to share files, that functionality has been limited to AllPeers shares. "What we haven't had was standard BitTorrent functionality," AllPeers cofounder and CTO Matthew Gertner told Ars Technica. "So we decided to add standard BitTorrent functionality. Having it within Firefox makes it easier for nontechnical people to use."
Gertner reiterated that, unlike BitTorrent, the AllPeers network is completely private. "All sharing is done between authorized peers," said Gertner. He believes that makes it an optimal solution for sharing user-produced HD video, photos, and other content between a select group of people without running into drawbacks inherent in using other third-party platforms for sharing content.
AllPeers plans to make money in a couple of ways. The first is an always-on feature that uses Amazon S3 to store shared content for a limited time. "With a P2P network, the disadvantage is that people go offline at times," Gertner explained. "We offer the capacity to upload shares to Amazon S3 and make them available to people via e-mail invitation." AllPeers plans to begin instituting a payment model for that service. Further on, AllPeers wants to get into media content sales like many other P2P services.
When asked about AllPeers' potential as a P2P darknet, Gertner said that his company doesn't encourage customers to share copyrighted content and that longer-term, his vision is to provide a "viable, legal alternative" for content providers. Gertner is also quick to point out that AllPeers respects its users' privacy. "It's none of our business to look at any of the videos or photos we're sharing," Gertner said. "People can feel secure about their privacy on AllPeers. Besides, if we started to spy on people, they would just move to another network."
For now, AllPeers will continue to hitch its wagon to Firefox. Gertner believes AllPeers—itself now available under an open-source license—can help drive adoption of Firefox, usage of which has moved past the 40 percent mark in some European countries. "We're seeing lots of usage in Europe," Gertner said. Longer-term, AllPeers plans to use XULrunner, a runtime for XUL-based applications that allows developers to easily code cross-platform applications entirely with XUL. Moving to XULrunner would allow AllPeers to be distributed as a standalone app as well as a Firefox plug-in.
When we last looked at AllPeers, we noted that interest in the service appeared to have died down since its launch, and a quick search of Google Trends shows that not much has changed in the past few months. Adding full-fledged BitTorrent support may give AllPeers a boost, and should recent crackdowns on popular BitTorrent trackers continue, users may fire up Firefox and download the AllPeers extension to keep the P2P traffic flowing.
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