Initially, AllPeers was not meant to replace traditional BitTorrent clients because it didn’t support .torrent downloads. However, this has now changed, BitTorrent support was added in their latest update, and they are now ready to compete with other BitTorrent clients and P2P firefox extensions.

Still, the more advanced BitTorrent users don’t really see the need for a socialized BitTorrent client. In the first versions of AllPeers, some users also missed the more advanced settings and features that their regular BitTorrent client offered, yet this can hardly be an excuse anymore since AllPeers added most of the essentials.

We decided to have a chat with Matthew Gertner, Chief Technology Officer at AllPeers who – like many others – uses the BitTorrent extension to get timely access to decent television. Among other things we asked him why we need a social BitTorrent client, why we should use it and what the future brings for AllPeers.

For those who are unfamiliar with AllPeers, at the bottom of this article is a video that shows the extension in action.

TorrentFreak: What is so great about a social BitTorrent client?

Matthew: There are two issues that we want to address with Social BitTorrent. First of all, there are relatively high hurdles to getting up and running with BitTorrent as compared to watching a streaming video on YouTube or downloading a song from iTunes. To some degree this is a result of the relative technical complexity of BitTorrent clients. We’ve addressed this by integrating BitTorrent into the web browser so torrent downloads behave more like normal web downloads. We’ve also hidden a lot of the details of what’s going on in the background, while still making this available to the more technically savvy user who wants to know what their seeding ratio is or how many leechers they are connected to.

Social BitTorrent starts to kick in to help with the other big hurdle: the difficulty of finding content. Of course, experienced BitTorrent users don’t have any problem with this. But I can say from personal experience that it’s a big challenge for newbies. Most people I’ve tried to turn on to BT gave up quickly because they couldn’t figure out how to find files. With our client, it’s much easier to introduce your friends to BT because all they have to do is install AllPeers and wait. When you have a torrent file you think they’d enjoy, you share it with them using our Drag-n-Share feature, and they click on it to download. This saves everyone the time of going out and hunting for files themselves, and downloads are also much faster because you can download from the person who shared with you and from the torrent simultaneously. Once people catch the BT bug, they’ll be more motivated to figure out how to go and find files themselves.

The other aspect of Social BitTorrent is more forward-looking. To be competitive with media distribution websites like Flickr and YouTube, BitTorrent needs social features. I should be able to comment on or rate a torrent file and see other people comments and ratings. Of course, most torrent websites let you do this, but we think this should be built into the network, not dependent on a specific site. I also want to be able to tie my media consumption via BitTorrent with my social network, and we’re geared up to do this since managing a private contact list has always been central to our vision. In the longer term, it should be possible to set up ad hoc communities around various content. For example, I’m a golf fan (some would say addict), so I’d like to be able to join a community where I can exchange golf-related content with other people using BT while discussing the content and just plain meeting like-minded folks.

TorrentFreak: Should people who are not interested in the social aspect of AllPeers try it anyway?

Matthew: I’ll be fired unless I say yes. :-) Seriously, I think anyone interested in BitTorrent should at least take a look at AllPeers because we’ve done something quite different from existing clients. That said, if it’s really important for you to be able to tweak every last parameter when configuring your downloads, it might not be for you since we’ve put such a heavy emphasis on simplicity. On the other hand, the convenience of downloading directly inside Firefox is a really significant factor and might attract a lot of people who don’t care about the social aspect.

TorrentFreak: Is AllPeers “feature-wise” ready for the more demanding BitTorrent user?

Matthew: It really depends on what you mean by demanding. If you want to make sure that downloads over 312Mb start automatically at 2am while consuming no more than 47Kb/s of upload bandwidth and using at most 50 half-open TCP/IP connections, then AllPeers is definitely not the client for you. (Although we leverage Firefox’s extension architecture so maybe one day people will be able to add more esoteric features as addons.)

That said, I consider myself to be a demanding BT user, but I’m also lazy and I don’t want to spend time tweaking anything. I just want downloads to be fast and reliable. For this reason we see advanced features like peer exchange and selecting individual files for download as necessities, whereas a lot of other companies left this type of thing out of early versions of their software. BitTorrent is a big part of my lifestyle because I live in Europe, so it’s the only way for me to get timely access to decent television (much as I enjoy watching Baywatch reruns dubbed in Czech). If AllPeers didn’t download as fast as other clients, I simply wouldn’t use it. As it transpires, I use it every day, so draw your own conclusions!

TorrentFreak: Will you release a light version of AllPeers that just adds BitTorrent support to firefox?

Matthew: To some degree we already do this, since you don’t have to register to use the BT support, only if you want to use our social features. Note that currently about 75% of people who download the client do register.

As far as stripping out all the code except for the BT client, we don’t have plans currently to do this. Our client is open source so this is certainly something that a motivated outside developer could do themself. In the longer term, we’re interested in investigating whether some parts of AllPeers might make sense as built-in functionality for Firefox, and BitTorrent support is an obvious choice. I’m not affiliated with Mozilla in any official capacity, and this is pure speculation on my part, but perhaps one day we’ll see BT support in Firefox “out of the box”, and I’d be delighted if this support were based on our code.

TorrentFreak: AllPeers is maturing fast, have you ever considered to release it as a standalone application, so non-firefox users can use it as well?

Matthew: This is a no brainer, especially since XULRunner (Mozilla’s platform for standalone applications) is maturing in parallel to AllPeers. I don’t even think the development effort would be that significant. Like every big, ambitious software project, we’ve constantly grappling with an ever-expanding to-do list, but a standalone version is slowly creeping its way to the top.

In the meantime, we do have a bundle called “Firefox with AllPeers” (produced in partnership with Mozilla) for people who want to install our client, but don’t have Firefox.

TorrentFreak: Can you tell us what the future brings for Allpeers? Any exciting features?

Matthew: I don’t want to ruin the suspense by giving away too many details, but we are focusing heavily on expanding the notion of Social BitTorrent that I described earlier. We’ve already developed a feature to let you comment on files that people share with you, which we’re currently testing. We also have big plans for letting people create sharing communities. Right now, most people use AllPeers simply to send files to one or more people. In the future, we want to make it possible to continue to interact with content in interesting ways once it has been shared. I should be able to search for content in a given community that interests me, view comments and ratings, get recommendations for other files I might like, etc. Basically my dream would be to see an Amazon-like experience emerge, but completely open and based on BitTorrent.

TorrentFreak: Thanks Matthew for taking the time to answer our questions!

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

You can see the new chat feature, and many of the other great features in this excellent video tutorial AllPeers published earlier today.

AllPeers is not meant to replace traditional BitTorrent clients at this point. It doesn’t have a user interface to download .torrent files, and there are no bandwidth management, or other advanced configuration options available. Matthew Gertner, Chief Technology Officer at Allpeers told TorrentFreak earlier this year that those features will probably be implemented in the 1.0 release.

Many BitTorrent users like the idea of a BitTorrent extension for Firefox, but would prefer a “lite version”. When we asked Matt if they had considered releasing a lite version of AllPeers, without the social stuff, he said: “We haven’t made a decision about this but I certainly wouldn’t rule it out. In any case, we’re planning to open source AllPeers later this year, so I assume someone could do this themselves afterwards.”

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Anyway, judge for yourself

Slyck article vs. Allpeers response

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In a few hours AllPeers is going to be released in the wild after 5 months of private testing. We did not invite all the testers during that phase but rest assured the remaining one will receive an email when the application is available.

Allpeers allows you to add friends to your buddy list, and share files with these people via BitTorrent. There’s no interface to download “regular” torrents yet, but Matthew form allpeers told TorrentFreak that this will change in the near future.

Actually we already support standard torrents. We haven’t added a user interface for this yet because: a) there a still a couple of issues we want to iron out and b) we still want to add features that make it competitive with leading BitTorrent clients (such as the ability to turn on/off individual files in a torrent).

You can take a look at the allpeers features over here to see what all the fuss is about. And take a look at the interview we did last week, if you’re interested in their future plans.

update: gogogo

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If you navigate through your buddylist you will see what your friend and family share with you. If there’s something interesting, you just click the “download file” button, and the file will start downloading as soon as it is available.

The extension works pretty good, although the download process is still a little buggy. 20% of the files I tried to download stopped or disconnected for no apparent reason (friend was online), but hey, that’s why it’s a Beta.

Overall I’m absolutely positive, but I must admit that I expected more of Allpeers than it is at this point. In my opinion there are a couple of things missing (ability to download torrents) so I asked Matthew Gertner, Chief Technology Officer at Allpeers about their future plans.

TorrentFreak: A lot of people were assuming that allpeers could be used as a “regular” BitTorrent client (downloading torrents). Are you planning to integrate this functionality in a later stage?

Matthew: Actually we already support standard torrents. We haven’t added a user interface for this yet because: a) there a still a couple of issues we want to iron out and b) we still want to add features that make it competitive with leading BitTorrent clients (such as the ability to turn on/off individual files in a torrent). We’re 100% focused on getting out the AllPeers public beta and (soon afterwards) the 1.0 version. We’ll finalize our support for standard torrents after we’ve gotten this
squared away.

TorrentFreak: Are you considering releasing an “allpeers lite” extension, without the social stuff (just a client)?

Matthew: We haven’t made a decision about this but I certainly wouldn’t rule it out. In any case, we’re planning to open source AllPeers later this year, so I assume someone could do this themselves afterwards.

TorrentFreak: Is there any bandwidth managing going on “under the hood”, so you will have upload speed left to browse properly? Are you planning to integrate a settings/options menu so people van set this, and other options, manually?

Matthew: We don’t do any management of this type at present, but it’s a high priority for us. It won’t be in the first public beta, but the plan is for the 1.0 release to have full support for throttling both upload and download speed.

TorrentFreak: One of the great features of BitTorrent is that it “saves” bandwidth. For example, if A shares a file with B and C, and B will share with C as well if they download at the same time. Is this integrated in the extension?

Matthew: Yes, that’s exactly why we’re using BitTorrent. If I share a large video with my whole family, for example, everyone who has started to download will be available as a source for everyone else.

TorrentFreak: BitTorrent is designed to transfer files between large groups of people at once. Are you planning to integrate “open” and searchable groups in the future (the option for people to create open groups, and a searchable directory within the extension), so people can get the best out of BitTorrent?

Matthew: Absolutely. We have big plans for letting people set up peer-to-peer communities and share files within them. Once again, this won’t be in the 1.0 release but it is something that we are very excited about.

TorrentFreak: What are the selling points of Allpeers, and how does it differ from for example DirectConnect?

Matthew: AllPeers is designed for sharing specific files with specific people in your buddy list. When you share, metadata about all the files is sent to the recipient, so they can immediately see thumbnails, file sizes, etc. without having to search for anything. This approach is inherently ill-suited to sharing huge numbers of, say, MP3s with a bunch of people.
Note also that sharing copyrighted content is not allowed according to our Terms of Service. The bottom line is that people who are expecting AllPeers to be the ultimate darknet tool are going to be disappointed.

On the other hand, people who are looking for a way to share files conveniently and efficiently with their friends, family and colleagues will find it to be a very compelling product. We also understand that there are legitimate reasons why people might want to share lots of
files with lots of people, and we plan to add features specifically targeting this type of use later in the year (as I described earlier).

TorrentFreak: Thanks

Matthew: You’re welcome

Matthew’s answers took away my main concerns and t seems that the future looks bright for this extension. In March Allpeers received significant funding by two venture capital firms that also backed Skype in the early days. The Allpeers Beta program started this April, around the same time they were crowned “Guidewire Group Global Innovator” at the Innovate!Europe event.

You can sign up for the Beta program at Allpeers.com

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The extension is currently in the Beta-testing phase.

Dmitri Popov, one of the Allpeers Beta testers wrote a reviewed the extension om NewsForge. He concludes:

there are some kinks in the AllPeers extension that must be sorted out before the public release (most notably, re-installing the extension requires a manual reset of your account at AllPeers’ end), the software looks very promising, indeed.

Let’s wait and see…

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AllPeers has been named ‘Guidewire Group Global Innovator’ and we have been selected to showcase our product at Innovate!Europe 2006 by the very same people who are organising DEMO in the US: Guidewire Group.

Innovate!Europe is a great opportunity to explore the most promising emerging technology trends, business opportunities, and emerging companies across Europe. See you there!

Allpeers
Innovate!Europe

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

As a result, this first phase will be very limited and reserved to only a small number of people. As time goes on, we will invite more and more testers but what it means is that even if you have filled-in our form you might not receive your personal invitation for some time.

You can still sign up for the BETA program

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Last week we reported that Allpeers received some extra financial support, take a look what they are doing with it.

Rocketboom at Allpeers

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Red Herring:“AllPeers co-founder and CEO Cedric Maloux declined to disclose the amount of funding from Mangrove Capital Partners and Index Ventures, but said it was less than $5 million,” says the story.

Maloux recently told p2pnet Allpeers will be open-source, and that the company would also release its own distinct end-user application built on the AllPeers platform.

“The service is and will remain free for sharing files in a private group,” promised Maloux. “Later, added-value services will be introduced. It’s like Skype: the VOIP service is free but SkypeOut, SkypeIn are not.”

Did that mean users can expect ads soon to be blotting the landscape?

Definitely not, Maloux continues, “there will be no advertising (banners or contextual text links or whatever) in the software.”

AllPeers is slated for beta-testing this month and Maloux, “maintained the software is to be used for the purposes of trading non-copyrighted material between friends and family. It will act as a BitTorrent client when multiple people want the same file by having them share pieces of it among each other.”

He also said the company, “would tell users they are not allowed to share copyrighted content but would not monitor their activities,” says Red Herring.

p2pnet.net

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