p2pnet - rss feed: Allpeers secure p2p chat
p2pnet.net News:- When Allpeers went official, it said it was billed as the best thing to happen to Firefox since Firefox.
It, “combines the strength of Firefox and the efficiency of BitTorrent to transform your favorite browser into a media sharing powerhouse,” it promised, going on that it’s explicitly designed to, “assist in the creation of so-called Web 2.0 applications: software that exploits new trends such as social networking, self-publishing and client-centric computing”.
Now, “I’ve felt for a while now that the instant messaging and web browser worlds are on a path of convergence,” says the Allpeers blog, continuing:
Yahoo is pushing their Messenger Plug-ins. Microsoft has a host of add-ins. Skype has a number of community-style extras.
But does adding web browser-like features to an instant messaging client really make sense? In our view, if there is going to be a universal communication client, then it makes much more sense to extend the browser itself. This is, after all, where we spend most of our time interacting with the online world. You can share content in your instant messenger but you really want to view it in the browser.
We started down this road quite a while ago with what TechCrunch called our “simple, persistent buddy list”. By adding identity and real-time presence information to the browser, we’ve created a kind of next-generation email with no spam, no file attachment limits and the immediacy of instant messaging (but without its disruptive nature).
The addition of instant messaging capabilities to AllPeers is significant because real-time communication is a important complement to sharing files and webpages. P2P means there’s no need to configure a server and all communication is encrypted to ensure privacy. It sits nicely alongside AllPeers drag-n-share functionality and gives a hint, I think, of the enormous potential that stems from adding identity and presence to Firefox. The next step is to integrate chat more tightly with drag-n-share to create a single coherent communication environment.
And here’s what p2pnet said when we wrote about Allpeers almost a year ago:
AllPeers Ltd is a UK private company founded by an Anglo-French team comprising Cedric Maloux (France), the former European vp of PlanetOut, and Matthew Gertner (Britain), the former ceo of Schemantix who’s now the company cto. And to make the enterprise truly international, the Allpeers development centre is based in Prague.
Maloux told p2pnet Allpeers will be shortly released as open-source and meanwhile, “we’ll also be releasing our own end-user application built on top of the AllPeers platform,” he says.
Given that Allpeers says it’ll be “deploying new services on AllPeers, some of which will require payment,” we wondered which, when and how much?
“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.”
Does that mean users can expect ads soon to be blotting the landscape? Definitely not, Maloux told p2pnet, “there will be no advertising (banners or contextual text links or whatever) in the software.”
If you want to see how it works, click here for a video.
If your Net access is blocked by government restrictions, try Psiphon from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk Centre for International Studies. Go here for the official download, here for the p2pnet download, and here for details. And if you’re Chinese and you’re looking for a way to access independent Internet news sources, try Freegate, the DIT program written to help Chinese citizens circumvent web site blocking outside of China. Download it here.
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Also See:
best thing to happen - Allpeers: Firefox file sharing?, January 4, 2006
