Scour is Dead

jathos writes "The Scour Exchange is dead -- see the announcement here. Does this just prove once again that one company cannot own a peer-to-peer file-sharing network?" Scour actually was a reasonably useful tool for finding wierd images. I used it regularly to find clipart for my own devious projects. Guess we'll have to wait for that multi media peer to peer system until Gnutella is solid.

Comments

It's not altruism, it's culling

[revbob]

The reason Gnutella, Scour, and the like were born doomed isn't that people aren't altruistic. Enough of them are -- let's remember that a tiny handful of people responding has kept spam alive all these years. For every 100 greedy Republicans who take but never give, there's one Naderite who opens up a whole pile of files. Even one altruist in 1000 would be enough, given a sensible number of people on the air.

The reason peer to peer sharing technologies are currently doomed is that, if they're successful, there will be considerably more than a sensible number of people on the air.

I've been on Gnutella when half the net went there, and let me tell you, it wasn't pretty. Like most people, I had to hang up or get overwhelmed.

A similar problem has come up in shared VR. If a tenth of the people who signed on to Cybertown showed up at the same time, it would be madness. If the net is a "never-ending worldwide conversation", as Judge Steward Dalzell said, then a conversation of 10 million or 10,000 people, when you can't tune any of them out, is a conversation in Bedlam.

The easy problem is how to filter out the noise. The hard problem is trying to figure out what, to a particular user at a particular time, is signal and what is noise. Area of interest culling is only a partial solution. While I might be interested in erotic photographs of large aquatic mammals today, I'm not exclusively interested in Flipper and his friends. I might be interested tomorrow in the polyphonic motets of Lassus.

An even harder problem is identifying which of a particular set of resources offered that are allegedly within my current areas of interest are of actual interest. I'm not interested at all, for example, in Flipper stills of the Ranger and the stupid kids, and I already have the picture where Flipper stands on his tail. While the file name conventions that have arisen among mp3 file sharers are a step in the right direction (and they picked an easy domain), the conventions are far from universal, and as people have found out, sometimes spoofed and sometimes just ignorantly wrong.

(I'm tempted to say that a central server that acts like a Library of Congress classification system may be needed, and certainly would be a more useful role for a central server than mere file name storing.)

And, of course, this must be accomplished without the overhead that makes Gnutella such a pig. And remember, Gnutella hardly tries to accomplish any of this area of interest culling.

While the developers of Gnutella et al have spent considerable time on networking technology and user interfaces (despite appearances!), they haven't yet taken more than baby steps toward solving the real problem that will make peer-to-peer sink or swim: determining and using areas of interest.

Rev. Bob "Bob" Crispen

Until then..

[webrunner]

CuteMX, by the makers of CuteFTP
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Overrated tripe

[Sloppy]

The capitialists just chalked up a kill.

WTF do capitalists have to do with this? The victims were capitalists too. The problem is specifically with assholes, some of which happen to be capitalists.

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Clitart

[g8oz]

I used it regularly to find clipart for my own devious projects

"Clipart", eh? Is that what you call it?

Let me use this opportunity ..

[Eloquence]

.. for some blatant self-promotion.

infoAnarchy reports on the many, many alternatives to Scour & Napster, be it distributed or centralized. It uses the K5 site engine, meaning anyone can submit stories and moderate submissions.

In our Resources section, you can get an overview of the many available file sharing tools. Here's the ones I would recommend:

• One of the best alternative feature-wise is Filetopia (its userbase is relatively small).
• And for MP3s, Songspy is quite powerful.
• If you like Napster, get Napigator. It allows you to connect to OpenNap servers where any file type can be shared (and which are not concerned by any changes in Napster's business model).
• A good alternative to the Windows Napster client is FileNavigator.
• Recently reborn: CuteMX, has a lot of features but requires IE.
• Somewhat closer to Gnutella, with distributed servers: DirectConnect
• Distributed, anonymous, encrypted: Blocks

But again, please come visit us at iA to find out about the best new tools. We know our stuff.

File sharing will never die.

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