The End of Gnutella ?(Frostwire Goes Bittorrent Only)

"After LimeWire was shut down last year FrostWire took over as the leading file-sharing application on the Gnutella network. But this didn’t last long. Today FrostWire announces that it will leave Gnutella entirely and focus on BitTorrent instead. This decision may very well signal the end of the once-mighty Gnutella network, while existing BitTorrent networks will only grow stronger.?"
http://torrentfreak.com/frostwire-ki...orrent-110627/

Any thoughts if the Gnutella network will die. What about Gnutella2 (which only Shareaza seems to support--almost no traffic from anyone else)?

What about the rest of the smaller networks--Emule, Soulseek, Ares Galaxy, Direct Connect, etc?

Have there been any recent polls on this site as to which networks readers here use?

There are still a few other million Gnutella clients. The network itself is sadly harmful to use with all those fake files, though. The "smaller" networks you mention appear to be doing fine, although eMule and Ares have seen better days.

And I'm surprised TF used the term "BitTorrent networks" - unless they were using the word on a broader sense, BT isn't a network but a protocol.

Neither FrostWire nor LimeWire ever had good BT support. In short they developed a BitTorrent leecher mod/Gnutella hybrid. I doubt this shift in focus will make any difference at all. Gnutella still has lots of legit users if you just know how to look for files. I started this thread way back when and others have updated it further, just ignore the last updated line as that is from the last time I updated it http://www.gnutellaforums.com/limewi...ind-music.html BTW smae forum has lots of good trusted mods like Filegirl's Bundle free FrostWire http://www.gnutellaforums.com/frostw...frostwire.html and Filegirl's stripped version of LimeWire Pirate Edition http://www.gnutellaforums.com/gettin...tml#post359817

A good client still should be Phex http://www.phex.org/mambo/ http://www.gnutellaforums.com/phex-cross-platform/ And also the real Shareaza which btw is still being frequently updated http://shareaza.sourceforge.net/?id=download http://www.gnutellaforums.com/shareaza-windows/

All older versions will of course also continue to work.

Since the LimeWire software was open-source, there are many re-badged LW clones out there - as well as other Gnutella clients. I never cared much for Limewire because it did not have a chat function. That's where you find quality material while avoiding fakes - by going into chatrooms and asking people.

Soulseek and Ares Galaxy have always been better examples of 'traditional' P2P networks for finding music - though on Ares it's been getting harder and harder lately to find chatroom conversations where people are not speaking Spanish.

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Originally Posted by zot

on Ares it's been getting harder and harder lately to find chatroom conversations where people are not speaking Spanish.

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For some reason, Ares became immensely popular in Latin America. I suppose it's for its ease of use - you don't even need to configure it to start downloading.

^^ Popularity can be a strange thing. Often it completely surprises the creators that their product becomes immensely popular in a distant country where it was never promoted.

At one time about half the users of WinMX v3 (and the vast majority of the users of v2) were Japanese. I also recall an obscure Israeli P2P called Peer2Mail becoming a huge hit in Brazil - but never made inroads anywhere else. In the early 2000s a Dutch-based P2P company called Kazaa became popular in the US, while at the same time a US-based P2P company called eDonkey2000 became very popular in Western Europe (especially among Dutch and Germans) while being practically unknown in the US. It's funny how serendipity seems to be the rule rather than the exception. :)

Ares looks like a case of that. The main coder behind the project comes from Italy as far as I know.

I once tried Peer2Mail, a long time ago... it was pretty good, but for some reason, it didn't convince me.

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Originally Posted by zot

while at the same time a US-based P2P company called eDonkey2000 became very popular in Western Europe

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Wasn't the company behind eDonkey called MetaMachine?

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Originally Posted by anon-sbi

Wasn't the company behind eDonkey called MetaMachine?

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Indeed it was. I've never quite understood why so many of these one-product companies use a completely different corporate name. Ares/Softgap, WinMX/Frontcode, etc. (At least Nero ditched it's original company name 'Ahead' and became just plain Nero.)

As far as I remember (this was 10 years ago) Metamachine was created several months or so after eDonkey2000 first came out, I think right before Swamp (Jed McCaleb) lost his job(?) in San Francisco and moved to New York and set up an office in Brooklyn.

I was a user in those early months, or rather a alpha-tester. Many changes occurred in that ultra-buggy software. Like when the protocol completely changed, all partial-downloads got nuked. (many downloads were already self-destructing anyway due to rampant corruption, since hash-checking was not yet a feature.)

Some more trivia:

Edonkey.com was another site entirely unrelated to ekonkey2000.com, and later became a 'scam' site, before being acquired and eventually replacing edonkey2000.com.

The originally (server-based) client was named edonkey2000, then a new serverless client was created named Flock, later re-named to Overnet. But rather than switching to this new client and proprietary network, most users switched to opensource eMule instead. So then Jed again renamed the Overnet client, and it became eDonkey (though the separate 'Overnet' network got to keep its name). In another reversal, the discontinued server functionality was put back in, as by this time the eMule 'network' had grown to be much bigger and more resourceful than the Overnet network.

Which brings me back to Limewire, which did a repeat of eDonkey (and not unlike the original Morpheus); having users "upgrade" to a back-doored software that could be sabotaged remotely in order to bring down the network, as demanded by the copyright cartel. Both eDonkey and Limewire sold "lifetime" (*cough*) 'paid' versions until the very instant they pulled the plug. Amid all the liars and back-stabbers, Ares' Alberto Treves was the only true hero I'm aware of: in response to the RIAA's demands, he open-sourced Ares.

OK , I've been here running my mouth too long. :)