Sort of. The program — called “Share”, as mentioned in the headline — is built on the same BitTorrent protocol we all know very, very well. The process of sharing isn’t a stretch from what we’re used to — all the new program does is provide an interface more suited to the purpose of storing and retrieving cloud-based files.
Is it designed to replace DropBox and similar services? BitTorrent says no, at least for the time being. In a comment to the original blog, the company revealed its expectations:
Right now, the product is geared toward sharing a file with a few friends, not long-term storage per se. However, as long as the file is still on your computer and in the group you’ve created, it’ll seed if one of your friends wants to download it.
So no exposing your hard drive to the internet masses — just those you know. According to reports (I couldn’t find any references in the original blog post), Share uses Amazon’s servers to handle the upload and initial seeding — so it’s not like your files aren’t going somewhere to start with.
It’ll be interesting to see how it works — even with Amazon helping out (at what cost, we don’t know) seeding seems a bit of a fuzzy way of ensuring your files are copied elsewhere. When it comes to storage, I prefer it to be a binary operation — either my file is stored in certain place, or it’s not. I can’t see this being a great way to making reliable offsite backups, for example.
BitTorrent’s made it clear the program is in alpha, so I’m sure it’s using the time and testing to judge just how practical and useful the software will be and how much it needs to scale. Everyone in the world owning a bit of everyone else’s files? That’s an interesting future, for sure.
[BitTorrent blog, via Geek]
Oliver
Saturday, January 7, 2012 at 7:52 PMThe concept is interesting but I don’t see it working better then dropbox or other alternatives like box.net or sugarsync. Bit-torent is made for sharing files on a larger more anonymous scale because people can seed once having completed downloading the file. This increases speed for everybody downloading there after. The problem I see with share… say you’re sharing a file with your mates. They’re download speed will be limited by your upload speed, a problem when their is only one seeder. Your upload speed is capped unless your on an expensive business connection usually. Why not upload to dropbox or another service and allow your friends to download the file at much faster speeds? This will also allow them to download the file when your PC is offline and you have the extra security of having a copy of the file on the cloud.
Tycho
Sunday, January 8, 2012 at 1:39 PMThis seems like an actually brilliant idea. Comparing it directly to dropbox seems unfair. Anything drop box is perfect for, dropbox is already perfect for. However dropbox also costs $100 per year for 50 gigs of storage. Then everything you want to share needs to be manually uploaded to a remote server before anyone else can grab it, making the system almost useless for sharing 100′s of gigs of content. Once a few members of the group have the file downloads should be fast and for business private servers can be used to cheaply add a lot of bandwidth.
smurfydog
Sunday, January 8, 2012 at 10:54 PMYou can already create a private torrent and send the torrent file to a friend to download the file from you. This is pretty handy if you occasionally want to send large files but don’t want to mess around with FTP.
I’ve used it many times over the years when I want to share a lot of pics, video or audio recordings with friends and family. None of who have any interest in learning how to use FTP.
This new service caches the files so there’s no longer any need for you to be seeding the torrent when your friend/family want to DL it.
Sounds pretty good to me.
anon
Tuesday, January 17, 2012 at 6:39 PMI use Tixati to share things with my family and friends, and with anyone else for that matter. It beats dropbox because it is free and beats bittorrent because Tixati is a much better client. Tixati seems to offer the same things as this share from bittorrent.