AllPeers Adds Chat: Becomes Relevant Again

AllPeers, a Firefox P2P file sharing plugin, had incredible hype when it launched in August (the rumors had been around for nearly a year at that point). People were calling it the “killer app” for Firefox, and the company is backed by early investors in Skype, Mangrove Capital Partners and Index Ventures. And since AllPeers is a Firefox extension, it works across all platforms.

But some of the hype was lost as AllPeers found itself among a flock of competitors – we compared four of them here. We named it the best, but noted that all parties to the transfer had to have AllPeers installed, something some of the others didn’t require.

Today they released a new version of AllPeers. There are a number of minor tweaks, including the way they handle file organization. But the exciting update is that they added a pop up chat feature. This would be extremely popular as a stand alone plugin, and adding it to AllPeers is a no brainer. You can now chat with friends as you send files, or just chat with friends without sending files.

I’m still disappointed that AllPeers and Flock haven’t gotten around to porting this to the Flock browser yet. Flock needs a P2P file sharing feature, and AllPeers is all ready to go.

More details about the release on the AllPeers blog, and check out the video below.