Exeem "Successor" to Suprnova Announced

After the demise of Suprnova, hype has risen over Exeem, the supposed heir apparent to the popular BitTorrent index. Today on Novastream, Sloncek announced it officially, but to me his announcement raised more questions than it did answers. Since the official exeem.com website still isn't up, I've got a few notes below. Thanks to several users on irc.suprnova.org, and Sloncek himself for answering my questions.

First, Exeem really isn't an extension of Suprnova as the hype might have you believe: the connection between the two seems more marketing than anything else. Sloncek has been hired to promote their product as the heir apparent to his popular website, but his involvement really seems to be almost entirely PR. It'll work obviously: my headline on this story mentions Suprnova, and so will hundreds of websites around the world in the coming days. "Yet another p2p app" would not create anywhere near the waves that "Successor to Suprnova Announced" will. I hope that people judge exeem by its own merits and not by its (clever) marketing.

Second, Exeem is pretty much what was rumored earlier: a blending of the tracker, the BitTorrent client, and decentralized indexing. It's Windows only. It's in beta now, and will be out at some indeterminate date in the future. It also has a rating and commenting system which appears to be somewhat rudimentary. It's unclear to me if the rating system will be as useless as other attempts, and I think this is the critical thing: Suprnova succeeded because the content available on it was verified and trustworthy. Suprnova was as much the work of a few dozen editors as it was a list of torrent URLs. So far no other p2p system has achieved that level of accuracy. Exeem supports magnet sites which is a start, but not exactly p2p either. And did I mention that it's adware?

Third, there's a mystery company. Someone is paying Sloncek. He won't say who, but there's a history in the p2p world of secretive development. Since Exeem is to be adware, someday it will have a billing address, which means the legal issues faced by predecessors like Napster and Kazaa will be forthcoming, which is of course why we have a mystery company that Sloncek won't talk about in the first place. We definitely haven't heard the last of this.

Personally I was hoping for more: source code and cross platform compatibility never hurts. These are the things that made BitTorrent a huge success. I guess I was hoping for a new protocol instead of just another Kazaa. I guess I was hoping for a monumental leap, and instead Exeem to be a more incremental step. I'm sure we'll learn more in the coming weeks.

Comments

Torrent trackers on Freenet?

[Tet]

I can't help but wonder if BitTorrent is the application that finally pushes people towards Freenet. That would appear to be the obvious way of decentralizing it, without requiring platform specific software, and providing anonymity for both producers and consumers in the process.

Re:Torrent trackers on Freenet?

[user9918277462]

Unfortunately Freenet is an incredibly inefficient method of data transfer. Remember it was designed with security and anonymity as top priorities, performance comes as a distant third.

I was hoping for a more innovative p2p app, perhaps combining the advantages of VPN-type systems like WASTE or DirectConnect with the swarming efficiency of BitTorrent. Such a system would truly take the world by storm.

At the same time it seemed obvious that Exeem wouldn't be such a system. From rumors circulating after the start of the closed beta (not a good sign to begin with) it became apparent that Exeem was just another closed-source proprietary network. It's really unfortunate but not at all surprising.

Re:Torrent trackers on Freenet?

[jr87]

their are several problems with freenet...#1 it's slow as hell (at least when I tried it) #2 it has become a haven for kiddie pr0n #3 you become a node holding said kiddie pr0n because you have no control over what you cache.... I think freenet is a good thing overall...but I cannot justify being a node on freenet because I do not feel right helping traffic kiddie pr0n... now if a mass exodus occured that marginalized these people I would feel better...but atm their is a helluva lot of kiddie pr0n on their...

sold out ?

[eyegee88]

So, the "mighty" owner of suprnova closed his website.
Very nice.

He advocates this new technology.

Who said the MPAA/RIAA did not stuff him some "funds" to provide the people some nice software
(ie: adware) that cleanly informs those nice
associations with the ip address of every peer/seeder. Think about it.

who did say the new software does not harvest ip
addresses and nicely hands em over to some place
accessible to the MPAA/RIAA ?

I do not know about you, but I am convinced some
donated funds from MPAA/RIAA could change the mind
of any site owner to join the " side"

just 0.02 euro