You’re right, allpeers is not about wide-spread distribution of content but for sharing with friends. These are 2 different things imo.

AllPeers just makes too many assumptions, the very least being that most people keep their web browsers running 24/7. I don’t know anyone who does this. The program just seems like a poor man’s DirectConnect to me, and even a poor man can afford that freeware app.

I guess it comes down to your expectations, if you are hoping for an encrypted darknet spanning the globe, this isn’t it. Even if you are hoping to share your war3z with close friends, according to the T&C’s, this isn’t it. (though quite how they can prove what you send, if it’s truly secure, I am not sure)

From my point of view, as a musician, it’s a great way to share my tracks with friends, contacts, and acquaintances. There are other ways, but this seems to work in a way which fits my systems. Firefox is always on, and I have never had speed issues with it, so I don’t see why having a client as part of it would ever cause me a problem. Its a good interface, I would use it for more if I could. (actually spent ages going through the hundreds of extensions last night)

I have been on the beta for a while now and look forward to the new features described. Just hope I can find some more people to share with soon….

Allpeers would be much better as a standalone app or as a plugun for an IM client. I do NOT want to load a huge filesharing engine replete with extra tab and tray icon every time I open my web browser. File sharing is about sharing with your peers, so why is it bundled with a largely one-way news viewing app? Plus, Firefox isn’t known as a lean and mean program – it consumes upwards of 100MB of RAM at idle. Also, the already atrocious Firefox load time tripled with Allpeers installed.

The interface sucks. Adding a friend wasn’t terribly tough, but I couldn’t see what files either of us had added – I could only share and download everything in our lists. You’re never quite sure when you’ve successfully shard a file, and you can’t be sure when you’ve begun actively sharing. There’s no progress indicator so you don’t know how far you’ve come or how long there is to go and you don’t know how many people are downloading at once. You can’t throttle your bandwidth either so it’s an all or nothing deal.

Don’t get me wrong – private darknets are a great thing and will undoubtedly become a very popular convention in our society as soon as someone does it right. In my opinion, however, making this app a Firefox extension is nothing more than a proof of concept. It’s like attaching a bar fridge to a bicycle just to see if it could be done.

PLEASE, Allpeers, do a complete teardown and start over on a sensible platform. Make it a GAIM extension or, better yet, a standalone app. This program reminded me how difficult it is to casually share files with friends and how badly the world needs such an app, but as it stands, Allpeers is not that app.