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Scour Acquired, Relaunching
Eric Sun writes: "Just got an e-mail from Scour that talks about how it has recently been acquired by CenterSpan Communications Corp. It tells you to either register for the new Scour Exchange beta testing program or to unsubscribe."
I remember when stuff like Scour and Napster started up by little guys in their basement or dorms or whatever. At the time they seemed to defy the large corporations by promoting the free sharing of media, instead of paying silly prices to buy it. Now the big corps are buyin these companies, and only allowing 'legal' sharing. I think once a company like scour gets bought out by a big corp, and you can no longer get all the good stuff, it basically loses all appeal it ever had, and people will move on to the next 'little guy' program.
Basically they are going to make Scour conform to the MPAA, which means somebody has to be reimbursed. So, there will be subscription charges or point of sale charges soon. I hate companies like these Centerspan clowns. They are taking an idea/technology they did not invent and try to convert it some thing they can cash in on by playing nice with the industry the technology threatened in its original form. Screw them! I am not paying to download stuff from them.
I just noticed this as I was reading their site, and noticed they dropped the word Exchange and scoured it off the right side of the logo .
I havent tried the new scour yet, but on their website there was an option to add your fileserver to SCOUR. I'm gonna assume that the way this new thing will work is it will keep a database of fileservers (carefully screening out the ones with non-MPAA-approved content) and instead of scouring the Exchange (good), you scour the List (not as good)
As I said in an earlier post, the things that attracted and kept users at Scour was (not in order) MP3s (illegal ones), movies (cam, dvd rip, etc), apps (cracked) and porn.
Now lets polish Scour nice and shiny for the big empty suits.
Dump the MP3s (those piss off the RIAA),
dump the movies (they piss off the MPAA),
dump the apps (apps piss off the BSA),
and why not dump the porn too (pisses off some politicians)
What's left? Unless they dont dump the porn, IMHO they will have trouble generating content that will keep users loyal. Peer2Peer is like Whack-A-Mole: For every one you kill two more pop up. And every time one of the popups gains the 'critical mass' of users where ~90% of searches come up with something the user cares about, you get one more juicy worm waiting for a user to bite it and ditch his current service.
They say meals look more tasty when you havent eaten in a while.
If a user is starting to have dry searches (be it for MP3s, porn, movies, apps or whatever is deemed inappropriate and fit for filtering out) that worm is looking more and more juicy and the current hook is rusting off. Combine that with lots of worms, and the attitude stops being 'that one looks better, I think I might switch' and starts being 'Damn this sucks! This isnt working and theres fifty other ones that are. Im gonna ditch the one im on and find a new one.'
Having that happen to users is the worst enemy of any web presence. Especially file searching.
If Scour (not exchange) cant keep themselves tasting good, they're done for.
--IronHelix
Someone provides something.
They want you to register for that service.
Big deal!
It's not news.
It's about as newsworthy as saying that Sears want you to give them your details before they'll send you a catalog.
Oh wait.
They do already.
So what?
Now maybe if Sears stopped providing their service that might be interesting.
But this, this is of no significance.
The trouble with dot-com startups is the very thing which they aspire to - going public - is the very thing which enables them to get taken over by larger, more established players in the market. And even if this isn't possible, when you're talking about the legal minefield that digital content has become, the threat of multi-million dollar lawsuits can succeed in scaring companies into giving up control a la Napster. My prediction is that over the next few years we'll see all of the for-profit digital content services get absorbed into the mainstream, being taken over by RIAA and MPAA member companies just to survive.
So it looks like this will leave us with the not-for-profit, decentralised services like Gnutella, which despite its flaws is less vulnerable to corporate bullying than services like Napster and even its open variants, all of which require a central point. Sure, you'll still be able to get your latest Brittany Spears MP3s over Napster or Scour, but it sure as hell won't be for free, and it's even less likely to be anonymous.
Actually, there's one way these companies might like to operate. Instead of asking for cash they could instead ask for personal information. Chances are this kind of information would be worth far more to them in the long-term than some kind of micropayment - it would enable true targetted advertising, the holy grail of marketing departments across the corporate world. And most people would rather give this information than pay for a service...
So when Napster starts asking for demographic information, you know it's time to start looking for an alternative...
An alternative, much like the old scour:
http://www.edonkey2000.com
It's pretty standard P2P overall, but has two great features already:
1. Files are checksummed and downloads are done in parallel, getting bits from as many other hosts have the file.
2. The thing I really liked about scour: you could look at other peoples shares, which was great (with scour) as you'd find pthat people who had 'X' that you just did a search on, were likely to have related Y and Z.
It's still beta, but there's over 600 people on at the moment, and a lot of sharing.
0.02,
Mike.
Tales from behind the Lagom Curtain
I am not going to preach, but give the 'lame ass garage band crap' a listen. Most of the bands today (aside from pop bands IE eminem, backstreet boys, etc) started in garages.
I have not tried the new scour, but if its what you say it is (no mp3, no movie, no porn) then they've just dumped 90% of the people that use it.
--IronHelix
First, one interesting tidbit. On the scour page there was a 'add your server to SCOUR' thing which would accept SMB servers. Interesting.
IMHO trying to make scour legal is going to be hard/impossible. Unless someone knows scour better than me, its good points were: (no particular order)
1. MP3s
2. Movies
3. Porn
4. Apps
To be more general, the good thing of Scour was that you could find just about anything.
MP3s are mostly illegal, movies are illegal, apps are illegal and nobody from the 'upstanding' corporate world really wants to deal with porn. The new company claims to remake scour into a legal service. I would like to know what that means. Because they're not being specific. My guess is that one or more of the above list will have to go or be replaced with PPPs (pathetic plastic placeholder).
1. ALL mp3s becomes studio sponsored MP3s (few)
2. Movies becomes Movie Previews (trailers)
3. Porn just might stay, not likely
4. Apps becomes Shareware Apps (not cracked)
In other words, Scour, the insanely great service that would 'scour' thousands of nameless users to get the file *you* want, has become 'rub lighty with soft cloth', a service that will scour fewer IDENTIFIED users and give you everything the RIAA, MPAA feel you should have.
Back on the first point, the add servers. To me this says they're moving away from the full distributed thing, and becoming more like iMesh. With hundreds of volunteer servers instead of thousands of sharing users, the content is under control. Their control. (IIRC, thats a bad thing for this kind of service)
Bottom line: Maybe they can pull it off. But if they start charging fees for filtered content, or filter so much nobody wants it anymore, they will be the next dot.com thats dot.gone.
--IronHelix
However, getting a single song on the spur of the moment was very easy with Napster. Since its demise (and I think it's a demise because I can hardly download anything from anyone now--and who knows why? It just fails. Plus it just hangs when I try to log in with anything over 2,000 songs shared. It used to handle 5,000+ no problem)...anyway, since its demise, I have checked a few others out. Audiogalaxy seems pretty low key. Aimster...looked promising, but after waiting months, they only got AIM buddies to work, not ICQ, and hardly anyone is on their server. Gnutella was fun for a while, but I like to also BROWSE lists...not knowing what I want till I see it. iMesh was always a joke. MojoNation was a pain in the ass.
I don't know where I'm going with this exactly, but I just want to say that Napster had key elements working for it that some people aren't mentioning here...
Power in numbers. There is always this "hump" that a new company has to get over: ever try a service...it looks good, but no one was there...so you leave? Process repeats? Napster...you show up. Everyone is there. You stick around. More people come, see you and everyone there, they stick around...etc.
People talk about Napster being easy to use. Then others say that other solutions are easy to use too. However, I state that when Napster first started out, not only was it easy to use, but it was quite reliable. In otherwords, if a person was "online" and their songs were available...there was a very high chance that you'd be able to download that song no problem. I just don't see that with services nowadays that link up ftp sites, etc.
Rader