I also believe that we would need much better integration with email (for some reason our current approach seems to baffle most users) and the web. Someone dubbed this “P2Web”, pointing out the growth would be far strong if a custom client were only needed for sharing, not receiving files. Of course, you would probably have to pay for large file transfers in that case, so the motivation for both parties to get the P2P-enabled client would be there.

btw, last I checked, Skype wasn’t doing so good either — if you look at the revenue. Looking at the dough the founders made is something else, of course

Regarding the technical advantages: I wasn’t trying to suggest that you shouldn’t be using BitTorrent for fast P2P downloading but was rather trying to say that, firstly, there could have been savings in implementation time through re-use of existing technology (i.e., XMPP servers and client libraries). Obviously I don’t know how much of your development time was sunk into that part but I guess it would have provided a nice jump-start, to build upon. Secondly, there would have been a large user-base right right at the outset (everyone on federating XMPP networks) with XMPP compatibility and also more potential for making people aware of your client.

For this latter argument, envision the following: You’re already using AllPeers and you send me a file to my regular XMPP client (Pidgin, in my case), using the regular XMPP file-transfer (which is a mess, but thats another topic and certainly something a dedicated group could have made a difference on). You would accompany the transfer offer by a message saying that I could get — through using AllPeers — faster downloads, thumbnail preview, and so on. In many cases, given the sorry state of file-transfer in existing XMPP clients, that alone would have made the switch interesting. Now, the switch itself would also have been made easier by the fact that AllPeers could have just re-used my already existing account on the other Jabber server, instead of requiring a new sign-up.

Last, but not least, you might have gotten people who want IM in Firefox and I also guess it wouldn’t have been hard to improve upon the GUIs of most current IM-client using Firefox UI technology.

Granted, these are all small changes, many potentials and so on. However, I reckon AllPeers wasn’t that far from achieving networking effects and these small changes might have been all that it took. That, in the end, is what I was trying to say with all this. Whether it was with XMPP or something else, by creating your own network, you missed out on networking effects that a larget network would have given you.

Hope this was somewhat intelligible. I’ve been reading too many papers today

From a technical perspective, it was always my understanding that XMPP is a client/server protocol, although they were/are working on P2P extensions. Am I wrong? Both our application-level wire protocols and authentication mechanisms were similar/identical to XMPP, but I don’t see how using XMPP would have obviated all the work we put into our P2P implementation.

To summarize: the biggest reason we decided to set up our own network was that we weren’t able to find anything else that fit the bill. Definitely not anything open source.

very interesting post — it is rare to get this kind of inside view!

So, thought I’d offer my thoughts on some of your points, both technical and not. Its been some time since I’ve worked as a network engineer but that was during the heyday of p2p, so the technical points might still be relatively well-informed. The rest is pure opinion

Regarding the technical challenges, I’ve often wondered whether one reason you tackled so much at once was that you intended to maintain a degree of control over the network. Much of what you did, protocol-wise, appears to be incremental improvements over XMPP and BitTorrent and there seemed to be no really obvious technical reason to require use of your own server and not to federate.

This has obvious implications for the growth speed. I suspect that, even though you maintain that Jabber is for nerds only (but see GoogleTalk), it would have increased the speed of growth tremendously if people could have re-used their existing accounts. Particularly given the sorry state of file transfer in most other XMPP clients

That said, a closed network is obviously one of the things that makes it hard to achieve network effects and viral adoption. Open sourcing didn’t change that because AllPeers was still a different network. I would suggest that while luck certainly is a factor in achieving these kinds of effects, it is not attributable only to lack of it that you didn’t.

To make this perfectly clear: I suspect that building your own network was not necessary and that the attempt to do was one, if not the, main factor in AllPeers demise. btw, GoogleTalk is also a good example of how one can build onto XMPP but still maintain brand identity.

As a corrollary, if you wouldn’t have had to invest the effort in doing that, you might have had some time to counter the problems with consumer p2p (which I completely agree with, as you know from my server post

To also end on a more positive note, I’m really happy to hear about your positive experiences with the Mozilla community and open source at large. What a rebound from that Schemantix situation!

Cheers, Ingo

Your experience could probably help another open source project, Metalink, which deals with downloads. It’s a bit different, but I think you’d be interested in it.