Use Red Swoosh to Serve Files For Free

Sounds like a clever way to significantly reduce the bandwidth costs associated with file hosting. Still I’d imagine though that if Red Swoosh continues to have a tough time upselling their paid-premium service, their profit margin will remain razor thin.

It’ll be interesting to see how receptive the typical mainstream user is to downloading a client app (probably not a big deal if it truly is small and spyware-free) but also leaving the client app running so that it can help serve downloaded files to other peers.

Interesting that they were “productive” in Thailand. On the app I’m assuming they were talking about of course

Well, I quite disappointed. The first (and only) time I tried to use it I found a bug, so I tried to report it. They have a wiki but there’s no place to report problems there. They have a forum but there’s no button to “create a new thread” or something like that. There are no e-mail contacts anywhere. Finaly, I found _one_ way to contact them: sending an e-mail to their “privacy issues e-mail”, the only one I found.

Keeping things easy is good, but making them too easy turns them complicated to several simple tasks like reporting a bug.

Mind Booster,

Email support can be found at support@redswoosh.net

A webforum post has been added that describes how to get account/log-in to actually participate.

We’ll make it easier over the next couple days.

Thanks,

Travis

From the user perspective, doesn’t coralcdn (www.coralcdn.org) offer a similar service, but without ads and without downloading client software. It relies on volunteer proxies rather than on the users themselves, though, so I don’t know how well it will scale in the future.

It works by adding .nyud.net:8080 to the hostname, like http://www.techcrunch.com.nyud.net:8080/

There is nothing new.
2 Similar productd :
- With no installation : http://www.peerfactor.fr/hd/index_us.shtml

The second one :
- Open-source (from the founder of Revver) : http://dijjer.org/

Seems like the same thing as Dijjer. http://www.dijjer.org/ Except I don’t believe that Dijjer makes you look at ads.

I am sure 80% of the folks will not install a client software just to download a file. Although I like the concept but having users (who click on the links) go through the unnecessary process is not a great experience.

They should look at partnering with browsers to deliver an integrated experience (a la photobucket and flock).

Abhishek

Couple of things;

1) Though dijjer is an interesting open-source project, we have not found dijjer to deliver great results from a performance or peer efficiencies stand-point. In fact, we have seen efficiencies well under 50% which means that your server is handling most of the load. Red Swoosh is handles on average well over 90% of the data delivered, has a clean installation system, reporting tools, and also a very interesting Javascript API and Widget development platform (http://www.redswoosh.net/learn_more_javascript.php). Dijjer is simply not up to par for this, especially as websites want downloads as fast or faster than a webserver, with high peer efficiencies (i.e. no bandwidth costs), that are trackable with decent reporting of downloads, users and other stats.

2) Keep in mind that Dijjer copied Red Swoosh (not the other way around). In fact, before Ian Clarke created Dijjer, he did some contracting work for a brief time at Red Swoosh.

Wow.. Travis.. you guys might have just started another web2.0 company must do - offshoring development team to some exotic island in stealth mode development! cool.. awesome idea. A must have for all web2.0 business plans and fastpitch!

Red Swoosh a where around long before Bittorent ,Peer Impact (and its LX systems distribution technology) and most other P2P systems .Good to see them back on track and using a bussiness model that suits this day and age .

Good luck ….

You know Mike,

One of the problems with these sites is the support for MIME types - if one is a video blogger for instance, the need for an interstitial ad interferes with the payback of “fast start” media.

Even paid services, like Box.net have their problems - thye at first set no MIME types - when I asked them to at least set .mov, they took a awhile, but eventually came through. However, I have been begging them to add WMV for months now, and all I get is a blank stare.

As more folks podcast, these storage providers will have to step up ad set thier HT access correctly, because the video populist sites are not of sufficient quality for professional HDV distribution.

Thanks

ADW

I want to say however that the folks at box.net are very aware of the problem and always keep me updated - they even saw my earlier post here, and dropped me a line.

you must be making a fortune here , Mike. Throw some my way!

Isn’t this basically just trying to mimic bittorrent? And that is already becoming sort of a standard, now that opera has included it, can’t be long before firefox follows. but probably not MS.

Bittorrent mimicked Red Swoosh and its predecessor Scour Networks.

Doesn’t work with Mac, huh; So, just Windows and Linux?

Mikka,

Though we were around awhile before bittorrent (we certainly weren’t mimicking them), you’re right that bittorrent has become somewhat of a standard. We’ll be building support for BT, and hope to release bittorrent support before the end of the year.

Travis

On the one hand, it’s great that this worked out for Swoosh.

On the other hand, I can’t help but wonder, how did the spouses, not to mention any school-aged children, fare in that offshoring scenario? Or is the team too young to have any significant attachments?

NJG,

We’re all a bit too young to have families just yet.

Also,

Rodney,

Mac users will be transparently redirected to origin. Expect a good amount of work from us in protocol support for bittorrent and Mac compatibility . . .

Thanks,

Travis

Addressing ‘Alan Wilensky’ above — Swoosh captures and faithfully relates Content-Type and Content-Disposition, so (for example) forcing a video to play or save with a given type should be no problem.

-david

This is great news ! I cant wait !

Travis, as you should know:

1) I never contracted for Red Swoosh, we talked about it, but it never happened.

2) Dijjer’s architecture borrows *nothing* from Red Swoosh’s architecture. Recall that I was building content delivery networks long before you and I met (remember Uprizer?), and certainly before I knew anything about your architecture. I respect NDAs.

3) If Dijjer borrows anything from any P2P architecture, it is Freenet, and Freenet 0.7 actually borrows back from Dijjer.

A temporary move from the Silicon Valley to almost any isolated place anywhere on Earth makes sense. There are too many dot com-like parties in Silicon Valley. May the history (not) repeat.

Ian, here’s what I do remember from those days of yore, . . . you did a full review of our architecture and some of our code and you signed an IP assignment and confidentiality agreement for the work you did.

Look Ian, there is a reason why people think that Dijjer is the same as Red Swoosh. . . it’s because from a website owner’s perspective it’s *exactly* the same to implement. It’s not a casual similarity. And it was not long after we did this review, the dijjer project gets underway. At the least you could say the optics don’t look good.

Given that, I hope you can at least understand why we might expect some level of attribution. I don’t think it’s a travesty (no pun intended) that you might have looked at others’ work including ours and put it into your own.

I think dijjer is a fine project, and there is a certain elegance to open-source projects — we’re actually thinking about doing the same with Red Swoosh following in your footsteps.

Now, I apologize for calling you out in a public forum like I did, but as you can see people were erroneously coming to the conclusion that Red Swoosh was the one who had copied dijjer. Now I know that we both agree that Red Swoosh is a superior CDN technology, but instead of being embarassed to say you looked to others and even Red Swoosh for inspiration, be open to the fact that you may have learned something from other folks.

We are open to this conversation, but would like to do so without burdening the TechCrunch webboard. What we will do is post all of our comments regarding this thread here: http://www.redswoosh.net/forum/?CategoryID=7. We invite you to post here as well, but if not please send me an email or other location to find your coments and I will post our response accordingly.

Thanks,

Travis

Travis,

I’m happy to take this discussion elsewhere - but since this discussion was started (by you) on this forum, I think I should get the opportunity to respond on this forum too. We can take subsequent discussion elsewhere.

If you recall, I did sign an NDA with you guys, and I reviewed your architecture as a possible prelude to doing some work for you, but I did not do any work for you, as evidenced by the fact that you never paid me anything (nor did I expect or ask for any payment - because I hadn’t done any work).

Dijjer incorporates many ideas that existed previously in other P2P applications, its HTTP proxy borrows from Coral Cache, its decentralized nature is from Freenet, its NAT circumvention is similar to STUN etc etc. If I don’t attribute Red Swoosh, it is for the simple reason that Red Swoosh was not the source of any of the ideas implemented in Dijjer. If it was, I wouldn’t be afraid to say so, but it wasn’t. I wish I could say that Red Swoosh had been an inspiration for something in Dijjer, since that would presumably satisfy you and make this silly discussion go away, but it would be a lie. Red Swoosh and Dijjer are *very* different architectures, despite outward appearences.

I agree that it was erronous for anyone to say that Red Swoosh had copied Dijjer, Red Swoosh certainly pre-dates Dijjer, but the remedy for this is not for you to make the equally erronous claim that Dijjer had copied Red Swoosh.

It is also true that Red Swoosh has a much more mature technology than Dijjer, which I really haven’t done much work on in quite a while, and it would not surprise me to know that Red Swoosh’s stuff works much more effectively as a result. I think Dijjer is a great starting point for a great piece of software, but it needs work before it could offer anything like Red Swoosh. One of its advantages is that it is open source.

I am not at all embarassed to say that I looked to others for inspiration, we all stand on the shoulders of giants. I’m just saying that Red Swoosh wasn’t one of them. Since Dijjer is open source you are welcome to poke around and find anything in there that was unique to Red Swoosh at the time Dijjer was implemented. To the best of my knowledge and recollection, you won’t find anything.

I will continue the discussion on your forum if there is anything more to discuss.

I couldn’t get it going. I installed it three times, shut down my browsers, tried FF and IE. But the idea is great. I think the initial DL is a pain for viewers. Need a way to build some trust.

Mick — Can you write dbarrett@redswoosh.net? I’ll help get you going.

Just for the record…. Tailrank was the first company to outsource itself! I spent from mid May to mid June on the beach in Phuket hacking on Tailrank 2.0…

I was very productive actually.. I was LITERALLY on the beach hacking on a 4Mbit link with my laptop.

w00t!…

Its certainly not for everyone and I thinkthe Red Swoosh team will feel the pain a bit… Krabi isn’t as developed as Phuket…

Kevin

Response to Ian found at:

http://www.redswoosh.net/forum.....e=1#Item_4

Kevin — How did you arrange a 4Mbps link?!? We were scraping by on *maybe* a 768Kbps satellite link. Talk about latency!

hi guy,

take a look at swarmcast.net

I always wonder how a potenial advertiser sees this. On the one side, you are trying to milk them, on the other side, you are working against them by offering your users a subscription system to get rid off them. It does not sound like it’ll work in the long run.

I dont see this benefiting anyone…. I installed the client, but I have never used the application. Why do I need redswoosh if I can download directly.

instead of marketing their site to end users, they should be marketing to companies.
The least they could do was display downloadabe links on their website.
my 2 cents