AllPeers Opens Doors to Public Today

by Marshall Kirkpatrick on August 23, 2006

AllPeers, the much anticipated Firefox plugin for drag and drop P2P filesharing, is going to start offering public accounts today according to a post on the company’s blog. The Prague based company has received funding from Mangrove Partners (early funders of Skype) and Index Ventures, and has received an overwhelmingly positive response in private beta testing (Update: except among the people who’ve left comments below!). When we posted about 50 invitations available for the service last week, there were hundreds of replies. See our extensive coverage of AllPeers over the last year. If you’ve been waiting, it looks like today’s the day.

Comments

Chris - August 23rd, 2006 at 12:09 pm PDT

Awesome! I have been waiting for this since… well, before AllPeers was announced!

Michael Lambie - August 23rd, 2006 at 12:55 pm PDT

not sure how sold i am on allpeers. my beta test was poor, b/c none of my friends would sign up. now i may have to give it another shot.

john - August 23rd, 2006 at 1:16 pm PDT

The beta seemed spotty to me. I seldom found files my friends left for me and vice versa.

Torino - August 23rd, 2006 at 1:28 pm PDT

Great news! I was using the private beta which restricted us from sharing with more than 3 people. I can’t wait to get all my friends on it bacause so far for me All Peers has been very convenient.

Bokar - August 23rd, 2006 at 1:38 pm PDT

other than it is a fireofox plugin, i do not what is the excitement about. how is this better than other p2p file sharing services?

Eric - August 23rd, 2006 at 3:35 pm PDT

I’ve had the beta for a couple of weeks. The UI is clunky and the featureset feels lacking… but I presume they’ve mostly been focused on the under-the-hood stuff to date.

While I hate to be the one to bring it up, my biggest question is where’s the business model?

Alex - August 23rd, 2006 at 3:38 pm PDT

Hmm.
I was excited when I first heard about this.. but I haven’t heard much positive from beta testers.
We’ll see.

Jason - August 23rd, 2006 at 3:53 pm PDT

Add me to the list of those who had a poor beta experience. Clunky, unintuitive UI. Had a tendency to crash and actually broke some of my other plug-ins. Great potential though… hopefully they’ve sorted things out since then.

Rich - August 23rd, 2006 at 6:06 pm PDT

I beta tested AllPeers too, and I have to say, I uninstalled the plug-in a couple weeks ago. It was more difficult to share files because you have to share discrete files or folders, not let the recipient choose from within a shared folder or anything. It also was a deal-breaker that AllPeers kept a Firefox process running even after i closed the browser window. This ate up some of my memory and for some reason took up loads of my CPU cycles from time to time, even without a browser window open. There was no way to disable the persistant proccess at the time I uninstalled. Amazing in theory… but it was a long way from realization of its full potential. The one unequivically positive thing is that thankfully AllPeers fulfilled the true definition of “beta,” which I feel sites like Google and others throw around to get hype until every last drip has dropped off the cutting edge.

El Guapo - August 23rd, 2006 at 6:13 pm PDT

I dont get this app. Why the hell would I want to combine my browser with a P2P file sharing app? This makes NO sense. I thought Techcrunch would approach this will a little more objectivity, but it seems there is no end to the “deals” that TC will make with these Web 1.5 companies.

Poincare Conjecture - August 23rd, 2006 at 7:05 pm PDT

I believe Pando is better although Pando currently has a “sending” approach rather than “sharing” approach to it. Allpeers will require the users to be online all the time while they are sharing files while with Pando, you can just send the file and forget about it…the receive can download at his own time with the next 14 days.

Also, with Allpeers, the person receiving the file will be restricted to the upload bandwidth of the sender. With Pando, you can receive the file at full throttle speed your connection can handle because it is not coming from your friend’s computer anymore…it is coming from Pando’s servers directly which reduces the time it takes to download files.

Allpeers will not be an attractive alternative unless it can implement some sort of backend servers where the files can be stored for a certain amount of time, particularly at a time when Pando is available although being limited to 1 GB can be an issue for some users out there. AFAIK, Allpeers does not limit the size of the files you share.

I wish Pando implements some kind of “sharing” approach as well, so that it can better compete with services like Allpeers, Zapr or Boxcloud.

lemon obrien - August 23rd, 2006 at 7:08 pm PDT

TechCrunch is lost in Web2.0 land…p2p is just p2p and sharing files with your friends is well….flickr….or youtube…or…..

We’ve combined p2p and ecommerce…creating an open market…where you get paid for sharing your files…unlike any other content platform…

otherwise…why not just steal it from limewire/bearshare/kazaa/edonkey/etc. etc.

and why would the VC’s invest in this, Skype was created by the guys who created Kazaa, which is a pretty good file sharing platform….until spyware took it over.

Pato - August 23rd, 2006 at 9:01 pm PDT

As a beta tester, I can’t say I am really happy. The usability of the interface is not that good, but that will evolve I suppose. What makes me more reluctant is the way it works. I might be wrong, but it does not look as pure p2p. What I mean by that is that there is indeed p2p from my firefox to AllPeers and then from AllPeers to the friend I send a file to, but it is not direct from my firefox to my friend. It is good because my friend can download my files when I am not online, but since I use this for business documents, I am really really concerned about data security and confidentiality. Maybe they have an answer to this…

john - August 23rd, 2006 at 9:06 pm PDT

this seems cool thanks for the intressting tech news tc
tekclick@blogspt.com

poop - August 23rd, 2006 at 9:25 pm PDT

I looked, and nobody was there. very few peers unfortunately. torrents work for me.

jonjon - August 23rd, 2006 at 10:22 pm PDT

where’s the money? what’s the value prop? why would people use it? what’s the relation between number of beta applicants and service quality or success? what problem does it solve that can’t be solve by existing tools? why isn’t TC asking any of these questions, and many more?

JoeZ - August 28th, 2006 at 12:27 pm PDT

This has to be the most overhyped thing in recent memory. And Michael Arrington has been the main hypster. One has to wonder if Arrington isn’t the Henry Blodget of this second bubble, except he’s hyping private companies.

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