I discovered today a feature which I had not realize was in AllPeers (Why am I the last one to know these things I ask you!).
Matt was doing a demo today for someone and said: “One other cool thing about AllPeers is that sharing screen captures is now a no-brainer. Press the “Prt Sc” key on your keyboard, click on the “Share” button and “Paste from Clipboard”. That’s it“.
If you are already using AllPeers I encourage you to try it out. It’s really cool and so easy.
By the way, in case you did not know either, you can also select any text from a Webpage and just drag it onto the Share form to share the text. This one I already knew about it. Did you?
When Mike Arrington from TechCrunch called us the “Firefox Killer App” and when we came up with the tag line “The best thing to happen to Firefox… Since Firefox” some people thought this was just some marketing gimmick.
The fact of the matter is that Mike thought, and we hoped, that AllPeers would help bring more users to Firefox since all your friends have to use Firefox in order to use AllPeers (hence in order to see and download your files).
4 days after our Beta launch, we’re happy to see this is starting to happen! According to the SpreadFirefox website, we are (at the time of writing this post) their 5th biggest affiliate. Looking in more details at the numbers, this actually means about 5% of the new AllPeers users were not Firefox users before.
This is great news for us because we really want to help Firefox reach out to more users. We will see how this trend develops over time as we improve our product but it’s really cool we can help add virality to this great browser.
Slyck, a popular P2P blog, is running a real hatchet job about AllPeers, so I wanted to respond and clarify the points raised by the article.
First and perhaps most importantly, AllPeers is not designed to be used for “darknet” applications nor have we ever made this claim. In fact, our terms and conditions clearly state that exchange of copyrighted materials is not permitted when using our software. So it’s natural that people who formed that expectation are going to be disappointed. AllPeers is intended for private groups of friends and family to share their personal media (photos, videos, PowerPoint presentations, etc.). We’ve invested all our efforts into making it a great application for this purpose, and the feedback we’ve received when it is judged on this basis has been very positive.
The article’s author obviously set out to find as many pernicious lies and misrepresentations as possible that we are alleged to have made, which is unfortunate. I would have preferred to see a much more balanced approach. A lot of the claims are just silly, some are rather harsh criticisms of software that is still in an early beta stage, while others are most probably the result of simple misunderstandings (which arise more easily when you concentrate explicitly on finding as many things as possible to “expose” about our dishonest ways). I’ll address the points one by one.
It’s true that when you install AllPeers, you’re prompted to register and that this registration screen reappears when Firefox is restarted if you haven’t already filled out the form. This is basically an oversight on our part since we haven’t received many (any?) complaints about this until now. People tend either to register or uninstall. But I agree with the author that this is too obstrusive. This is, after all, exactly the type of issue that the beta phase is intended to reveal. We’ll change it in future versions.
We’ve said many times that we are planning to open source the software but that we have not yet done so. If the author had looked a bit harder for information about this instead of trying to hunt down our source code (which would obviously be displayed prominently if we were open source), he could have established this fact quite easily. We want to get much further with our beta testing before we start worrying about all the additional work associated with setting up a proper open source community.
I have to confess that I don’t understand the uploading issue. I’m not sure that we were particularly unclear, but to be safe: what we mean by this is that, unlike centralized file hosting sites, you don’t have to wait to upload all your files when you want to share them. Instead, they are shared using a P2P network. I think perhaps the author honed in on one specific use case, which is when you share a file from the web. In order to ensure that the file is available when the recipient wants to download it, we store a local copy. I’m not sure, however, what (if anything) this has to do with uploading.
I guess the article is simply commenting on our investment, not criticizing it, although the tone is as negative as the rest of the story. We have a great business model that we will be implementing in future versions, but for strategic reasons we don’t want to be specific about this now. Stay tuned and all will be revealed in good time.
Some people have experienced problems creating their username after installing the extension. Please do not despair and try again later. Our registration server is suffering from time to time from the rush. Apologies for that. We are looking into this.
UPDATE: We will soon issue a patch which will fix the registration problem. It has affected a very small number of users but we do not want to leave anyone out. We will let you know here when it is available and we will also email back people who have contacted us directly to report the problem. Thanks.
UPDATE 2: If you cannot wait for the fix, you always have the option to register again with a different email address and choose a different username. Not ideal but that’s the way around for the time being.
A little over 24 hours and more than a few gray hairs later, the extension is now officially online and working on all platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux). Many thanks to Mike Shaver and the whole Mozilla crew for saving the day. You can find the first AllPeers public beta on the official Firefox extensions site. Sorry again for any inconvenience caused by these teething pains.
Just to reiterate what Cedric said in his last post, this is still a beta and we’re keen to hear about any suggestions you have for improving AllPeers. We’ve built a fabulous foundation (if I may say so myself) so you can expect to see rapid progress from here on out. I’ve seen a lot of questions of various stripes here and around the blogosphere. I’ll get a FAQ out as soon as possible that addresses them all and gives some more insight into our long-term plans.
Update: Yes, our registration server is a bit overwhelmed right now. Please be patient if you are having difficulty getting through to register or restoring your account. We’re working on increasing the capacity of the server.
In a few hours AllPeers is going to be released in the wild after 5 months of private testing. We did not invite all the testers during that phase but rest assured the remaining one will receive an email when the application is available.
We know some people have high expectations about this product so maybe it is time for me to put a few things straight:
1/ AllPeers is still a beta product so don’t expect it to be perfect (yet).
2/ Some features have not make it into this version so they will come out later; they include Chat, Comments, Tagging, support for external torrents.
3/ AllPeers is for sharing privately with friends and family; not for massively distributing files amongst strangers.
I’m very proud of the development team. They have created certainly what is the most ambitious Firefox extension to date (more than 200,000 lines of C++ and JavaScript) and the result is impressive, cool and useful!
I am using AllPeers everyday and have stopped attaching files to email (this is soooo 2005). I also love our ability to drag and share any picture off the web but my favorite feature has to be the ability to send a webpage to my friends just by drag and drop.
Finally before our young company moves to another phase of its life, I would like to personally thank all the private testers who gave us their time and some very valuable feedback to help us make AllPeers better and better. This is just the beginning…
Blog Bonus: While waiting for the launch, feel free to have a look at the AllPeers Product Tour which will go live with our new site.
UPDATE: AllPeers will be made available directly from the official Firefox extensions website. We are now waiting for them to upload it on their servers and since this is outside of our control we cannot promise any specific ETA.
UPDATE: Matt here. There were a few issues with getting up on the Firefox extension site since AllPeers is one of the first larger extensions to be hosted there, but the folks there have got the situation well in hand. It’ll be up very soon. I’ll post again in a couple of hours with a (hopefully definitive) update. Thanks for your patience!
UPDATE: Yay, I hacked the WordPress database and managed to get the post back (if you don’t know what I’m talking about, just ignore me). If you left a comment on my temporary post that wasn’t about my temporary post, please resubmit.
Blogger Livia Iacolare has created a video of AllPeers. Here it is:
This is just one way to share files and since our launch is only hours away now, you will be able to experience other ways including our Drag’n'Share feature first hand yourselves very very soon.
TorrentFreak, the blog specialized in BitTorrent and P2P has a review of AllPeers here including some Q&A with Matt about some of our plans for the future (the non secret ones of course)!
In the next few days we will invite more than 50,000 people who had registered with us in the past. Tonight we emailed a new batch and because of the holiday season we received back some interesting auto-responses. The winner so far (who has won nothing I’m afraid) is someone currently in vacation in France with the following auto-responder:
I will not be available by land line, mobile/cell phone, podcast, courier, voice mail, satellite phone, fax, pager, telex, telegram, telegraph, text-messaging, video-link, conference call, e-mail, instant messaging, multi-media messaging, wireless handheld device, walkie-talkie, CB radio, megaphone, snail-mail, owl, pigeon post, telepathy, smoke signal, fog horn, UPS, or special Eskimo delivery.
It’s crunch time for our public beta, and appropriately Mike Arrington posted a flattering review of our private beta over at TechCrunch. He twisted my arm and made me agree to offer 50 invites for the private beta to his readers. As it turns out, demand has outstripped supply, and I’m in a giving mood so I upped the ante and added 200 more invites to the pot, on top of the 100 or so that have already been requested. Share and enjoy!
W00t! We released AllPeers 0.37 a couple of days ago, and we’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback from our private beta testers. We’re focusing right now on the following areas: reducing memory consumption, improving performance, providing more feedback to the user about what AllPeers is doing (sharing, downloading, etc.) and beefing up our data center in preparation for the public launch. Version 0.37 already represents a major step forward in all of these areas. So if you’re using AllPeers right now, don’t expect to see new features between now and the public beta, but do expect to see continual improvement on these points.
