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Is AllPeers FireFox's P2P "Killer App"?
Vivek Jishtu writes "Tech Crunch predicts that the AllPeers Firefox extension will massively increase the attractiveness of that already popular browser, drawing more millions away from embattled Internet Explorer.
AllPeers is a simple, persistent buddy list in the browser. Initially, interaction with those buddies will be limited to discovering and sharing files."
Interesting to speculate about software that we can't download, so can't try. Yes, it could be a killer app. Yes, it could be dead on arrival. We won't know until we open the box! Wow, that was interesting...
My blog
Looks like a load of hype to me. I've never been a fan of mergin applications into "suite"'s or such. I don't even like media player's in my P2P apps, too many bad experiences with fudged partial videos or mp3/ogg's trashing the process.
Give me simplicity without the unnecessary integration.
This looks like a great feature, but it also looks like it could be a consistant security breach waiting to happen. These are the features and user toys that have plagued Microsoft security. Let's hope we don't trade safety for neato-gizmo stuff. And now I will don my tinfoil hat and be silent.
One ring to bind them - should probably have more fiber and less rings in their diet.
....but I thought the continual vulnerabilities in IE and the better interface (tabs, etc) were what pulled folks from IE. Isn't Firefox itself the "killer app"?
I believe AllPeers has already been slashdotted, did we need this once more? They *still* haven't released their software. Woop-dee-doo.
All Hail Discordia. Hail Eris. Fnord.
Granted, I've only used a handful of bittorrent clients, but my biggest complaint with most is that they use the majority of my bandwidth, and I can't even get google to load when I have them open, let alone most other sites. Why would I want to have this happen every time I open Firefox? I open my browser to surf the net, not get bogged down with extensions that drain every ounce of my connection so I can share a single picture or movie with my girlfriend.
Granted, its a good idea, I just hope they fix that one thing that plagues other clients. With Bittorrent, typically, you're sharing larger files, with this, the intent (though I'm sure it will be used for other things as well) is to share smaller files with close friends. Hopefully, this will be taken into account in the final version.
In the future, AllPeers will also have folders to allow public sharing (probably with restrictions to control copyright violations)
Why does it need restrictions at all? You can do the same thing with an unrestricted email attachment. Just put in a warning notice about sharing, but don't restrict its functionality.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
But that's the lovely nature of Firefox. The Mozilla Foundation can concentrate on building a better *browser* while leaving the API open to developers who want a little more from Firefox via Extensions.
I think plain, vanilla FF is a wonderful browser. The Extensions I use just make it better....for me. I don't expect my roommate or my girlfriend to run the same extensions I do, or even run any.
Anywhere we see "get our program, its the XYZ killer app" its usually a bit of a pretender.
The killer application for firefox is BROWSING THE FRIKKIN WEB.
Stop trying to cloud the waters.
liqbase
So the parade of new apps for Firefox continues. And how long before there are so many "killer" apps available, that Firefox begins to suffer IE bloat? I'm not a P2P fan, so this doesn't appeal to me at all, but it will to a great many people. And so will the next big thing, and the next, ad infinitum, until the complaints begin that Firefox is crawling and unmanageable. If this is such an important functionality, build it right in and make sure its optimized.
Uhm, you do realise you don't need to install it, right? This is optional, non-mandatory stuff. You choose to use it if it appeals to you.
The last time slashdot covered this the response was "come back when this is more than vapoware." Well, this is still nothing more than a bunch of slides. What has changed since the 28th when the story was last published? (Nothing, it seems)
Listen up, people: that functionality is what geeks (like you and me) want. It is *not* what the vast, vast, vast majority of browser users want.
... well, that's it ... there are no other users.
By far, the most frequent browser users are corporate people who have (significant) parts of their internal operations accessible by a browser. They won't be using it because the company's internal operations aren't set up that way. (And if you don't understand that dimension of browser users, you ought to look at where most Windows desktops are deployed: in a corporate environment.)
The next most frequent users are moms, pops and their kids at home visiting numerous sites for homework (read "plagiarism"), sports news and recipes. (And if you don't understand that dimension of browser users then get up out of your chairs, walk down the street and do a door-to-door survey of people in your neighbourhood.)
The next most frequent users are people like you and me: intensive users who push the boundaries -- who stopped using IE years ago (I'm mostly Opera, occasionally Firefox and still have a version of Lynx that I can launch).
The next most frequent users are
So basically: when you get to the people who use their browsers the most, you're also talking about the smallest cohort of browser users. Killer app? Sure: but only for us.
Since the AllPeers applet is still in the box, it's impossible to say whether or not it's a killer app. Since we cannot directly observe AllPeers, it must be existing in a meta-state where it is at once both a killer app, and in fact not.
But I'm slightly uncertain about this.
There's a Starman, waiting in the sky / He'd like to come and meet us, but he hasn't got the time.
I can imagine the FUD campaign the RIAA would run against FF and Microsoft running their own to put FF into the category of P2P software, which will result it in being banned from most businesses.
EvilCON - Made Famous by
And in other news, the Open Office suite has been released as a Firefox Plugin. Analysts predict that not only will this draw users away from from IE, but millions will also switch away from Office.
An interesting quote from the article, "What we're really waiting for is someone to release a linux distribution as a Firefox plugin. This will spell certain death to both IE and Windows simultaneously. The big hurdle is to figure out how to launch Firefox before the OS has even booted."
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
Allpeers certainly does look awesome, but what's it doing in a web browser? It belongs in an IM client like GAIM or as a standalone app. I've been waiting forever for an easy way to share files with my friends, but I'm not crazy about the idea of tying up 100MB of RAM leaving Firefox open all the time.
The extreme unix view is to get a lot of small apps that each do exactly 1 task and do it well. This has some advantages. The first is that the builder of such an app can concentrate on just 1 problem, another is that you should be able to mix and match. If I want to search through a number of files for a text string I can combine a number of tools as I want.
The disadvantage is also clear, you gotta learn about a lot of apps to do one end task. In windows search is simple. In linux it is two apps each with different syntax rules. Windows search is limited, linux search is complicated.
Another way of doing things is in adding similar functionality to an existing application. Making it feature rich or bloated (depending on your point of view). Web browsers are an obvious example. Should for instance bookmarks be part of the browser or a seperate app? What about a media player? Should the capability to view the source be an internal app (ala firefox) or an external app (IE and opera). Email? Well it is part of the internet isn't it? RSS? XML viewer? XML entry?
Get the picture?
I don't like suits either but then I am not a typical user. I prefer my email and browser and p2p and media player to be nicely seperated. Then again I can live with the fact that I have first to click on a link then choose to save the torrent file then go azureus select open torrent, select the torrent and finally be able to start leeching.
You would be suprised how many people would scream bloody murder if they had to do this.
Sadly it seems that at least in the browser sphere you and I are loosing. Feature creep seems to be a way of life for browser developers.
Anyway I wish the company luck, they already seem to have gotten themselves some free advertising and without even having a product to showoff. Good job.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I wonder if the story submitter realizes that Netscape has bundled AIM as a sidebar extension since the earliest release of Netscape 6 Beta? Might come as a serious shock to his system that this "killer" app is not so "new" or "killer" after all. ;-)
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
IE bloat = sneaky underhanded spyware crammed into IE, often by the computer vendor itself. Primarily designed to pump ads to the user and monitor their actions. Installed as covertly as humanly possible.
FF bloat = extension developed by opensource developers specifically to provide them with crap they want. Users go out of their way to fetch the exts and FF makes them jump through some hoops to complete the process.
not quite the same. When bonzi.com makes a firefox extension things may change, but for now they're different.
suffer IE bloat? Firefox already is more bloated then IE. I still use IE, because its simply much faster, yeah, it helps that its preloaded into the OS and such but its just _faster_ than firefox.
This is indeed a killer app... if it were a standalone app. Why isn't it? And why isn't there already an app like this? It doesn't seem as though it would be that hard to create, but everything I've tried for private filesharing within a group of friends has been either too complex (waste), too limited (grouper, icq, msn, etc) or too braindead (many others).
Just give me a torrent client or emule-like app that I can limit to a group of defined contacts.
You're right in your analysis, but wrong in your conclusions. You forgot that those corporate people have a life outside the corporation.
When they go back home, they usually will want to communicate with the group of moms, dads and kids - which don't necesarily use the same computer or even live at the same house. This is the point where an easy protocol for sharing content is most needed (mail worked well for a time, but it didn't scale to the current big multimedia files of video, mp3 and digital cameras).
The sharing of these kinds of files between the two biggest user groups *is* what will make this a killer app, if it has a well-implemented user-centered interface.
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
What is with all this social networking crap? Egads. The only technological phenomenon more annoying than blogorrhea (and Mac fans) is this recent notion that everything I do online should be intimately shareable with everyone I know. Hello? If I wanted social interaction, I'd go hang out with people instead of huddling in a dimly lit corner of my basement staring bleary-eyed at the cold, pale glow of my CRT.
Come on people. Am I the only one who still does shit alone on the Internet?
</troll>
And yes, I too appreciate the irony of spurting antisocial rants on a community web site.
No, the "killer app" for Firefox is, has been, and forever shall be Adblock.
Instant message programs and file sharing programs are a dime a dozen, but Adblock is what separates Firefox from other web browsers. It'll have a far more profound effect on the web, too, as eventually it'll become clear to advertisers that the conventional massive blinking ad in the middle of the site's content just isn't as effective as the innocuous text-only ad, because users are far more likely to block an annoying ad than they are a simple text ad.
Vaporware is always a killer app. Nobody advertises an application that doesn't exist yet as merely being a decent app that will do a job.
Vaporware is always hyped as a killer app.
I can only imagine this was done as an extension because XUL Runner isn't finished yet.
I think using the browser as a host for other apps is cool, there will be a bubble in this as there is in so many other internet trends. Right now we're in the "Wow, let's write an extension because we can!" phase (partly because the only practical way to develop with Gecko is as such, see above). When everyone gets over the cool factor of it, the projects that actually enhance (or even relate to, for that matter) the browser experience will be distilled away from what should have been standalone apps in the first place.
As much as some people want to think the OS will become merely a life support system for the browser, it just isn't going to happen; the network is not the right place for some things, and if one program has everything, it inevitably becomes bloated and slow.
Go here and enter your email to be alerted when AllPeers goes live. I'm going to try it out, for sharing photos and home videos between friends/family, this sounds cool. Kinda like a .Mac for everyone.
fak3r.com
A news client! ..oh... what? Moz... wha? Oh.
An HTML editor!
An Email client!
An IRC client!
A Javascript debugger!
Please everyone, stop making my browser into a suite.
Love,
Me.
Yes, it's a bit silly to speculate about whether AllPeers will or won't be the killer app for Firefox when you can't even see it yet. That said, Michael is making an important point, and I'm afraid that a lot of people aren't grokking it because they attach too much baggage to the term "P2P".
We're not making a Kazaa clone. We're giving people the possibility to share files with their friends and family inside Firefox. This *could* be a killer app because it gives people a real motivation to switch their non-technical contacts (especially family) to Firefox so that they can share with them. In other words, we're adding network effects to Firefox.
Does this mean that AllPeers will be the killer app for Firefox? Who knows. But the idea itself isn't patently ridiculous. If you want to make your own judgement, please register for our beta and check it out when it's available. Also, read my blog if you want more technical nitty-gritty about what we're up to.
Peer Pressure
So let's see. By using BT to share personal files with a few people, you forgo the one big reason to us BT: high speed downloads thanks to swarming connections with multiple peers.
Take that away and you're left with a buddy-file-transfer scheme that's actually going to be slower than any of the competition. Unlike the major IM clients, anyone behind a firewall or NAT (meaning almost everyone) will have to not only open ports on the firewall but also forward the ports to their PC in order to get an upload speed of more than about 10K/sec. And unlike uploading the files to your personal hosted webspace (which you can usually do a whole lot faster than a BT upload), the files are only available for download when your PC is online? Are most people with desktops going to leave them on 24/7 and turn off power management just to keep the new baby pictures available when they could have just uploaded them to Kodak instead? And what about laptops? How effectively are laptop users going to effectively share much of anything?
Also, doesn't using BT generally degrade web browsing performance? If I'm going to have BT on my own PC at all, why would I want a client that shuts down when I'm not browsing, which is normally when I'm happiest to let BT eat up all my bandwidth?
This gets funding? Meet Web 2.0, eerily similar to Web 1.0.
Actually, you can do EXACTLY that with AIM, and you can set it so only certain "buddies" are able to access your files.
"Of course, setting up a folder with all of your commercial music available to all of your buddies would be a copyright violation, so that won't happen..."
OH NOES!11!!!uno Actualy, I have done EXACTLY that. Well, with certain people. I R teh p1rate.
If by "killer app" you mean, "all chances of being used in a corporate environment are dead" then yes, this may turn Firefox into just that. Until FF gains central management of (amongst many other things) allowed plugins, then P2P capabilities via plugins are, in fact, a strike -against- deploying FF. I'm surprised we don't already have plugins for connecting to the popular IM services, which is another common problem.
We need to be giving corporate decision-makers -more- reasons to switch to FF, not fewer.
of my current project.
Its a superposition of the finished and unfinished state. No wonder I'm scared to look at it.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.