UK/Prague based peer to peer file sharing startup AllPeers announced that it is shutting down today: “We have not achieved the kind of growth in our user base that our investors were expecting, and as a result we are not able to continue operating the service.”

AllPeers first launched in 2006 to an incredible amount of user enthusiasm. They allowed anyone to create a private BitTorrent-like file sharing network via a Firefox extension.

We compared AllPeers to a number of competitors in late 2006 and found it to be the best service for those looking to create long term sharing networks with friends. Late last year they turned open source and began to build in full BitTorrent functionality into the service as well.

But apparently none of it was enough to keep the company on its feet. AllPeers had raised a single round of financing from Mangrove Capital Partners and Index Ventures.

AllPeers joins the DeadPool.

UK/Prague based peer to peer file sharing startup AllPeers has launched a sneak peek of their latest release candidate (0.7) just for TechCrunch readers (available here), which includes a fully functional BitTorrent client. AllPeers is a Firefox plugin that lets you easily share files amongst your contacts, using BitTorrent to speed their progress.

Although AllPeers started out as a peer to peer file sharing FireFox plugin for friends and family, they have recently broadened their horizons under the pressure of new entrants. The recent versions have come with some useful updates. AllPeer has opened their torrent network beyond your buddy list to any torrent file for some time, but has now enabled unregistered use and social torrent sharing.

Advanced torrenting users may be put off by the lack of fine grained control, but the system is meant to be accessible for people who don’t already use BitTorrent. To that end, it adds much of the simplicity and transparency offered from other torrent downloaders like Wyzo and FoxTorrent, but with an added social layer (if you register).

When you start downloading a torrent, you can share any or all of the files with users on your AllPeers buddy list. When a contact starts downloading the file, they download it from the public torrent network as well as your own system – given the nature of BitTorrent, this will have the effect of speeding up the file download for everyone. Tying into this social layer, AllPeers has also included an auto-download feature that automatically downloads files as your friends share them.

AllPeers launched with a bang but then struggled along with a whimper. That’s why today’s news that they are taking their source code open source (a popular move lately) is both a surrender as well as a glimmer of hope for the struggling startup.

AllPeers is a great idea in theory. Users can create private P2P file sharing networks, away from the prying eyes of the RIAA and MPAA fascists. But a number of other startups that also allow private file sharing have launched in the last year as well, and all are fighting for user attention.

AllPeers does have many passionate users, and some of them will now contribute to the open source project. The first few comments to the announcement are very positive – hopefully this will help AllPeers gain momentum.

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.

File sharing has long been a popular use of the Internet. I remember sitting at my laptop and asking a friend to name a song, and then seeing if I could download it off of Napster and play it before he could find the cd on the shelf, put it into the player and play the song himself. I often won those competitions.

The old Napster is long gone, but was of course replaced with many other P2P networks. Today, a significant portion of Internet traffic is comprised of files being moved over bittorent, a popular and completely decentralized way of sharing files.

Bittorent, though, requires some basic technical knowledge and is neither anonymous nor safe. The RIAA and MPAA routinely monitor these networks and attempt to collect IP addresses of computers they believe are involved in the transfer of copyrighted files. And bittorent is notorious for transferring files that (sometimes) contain viruses, spyware and other malware.

Enter private file sharing networks. WASTE was released in 2003 and allowed people to create private networks among trusted friends. Files could be shared without worrying about malware or prying eyes. All that was needed was trust among the members of a particular network. The downside of WASTE was that setting up and participating in a network was not trivial to do. Private networks did not take off and achieve mass use and adoption.

A new crop of services has popped up recently to make it much easier to share files with a private network of friends and other trusted people. Allpeers, Zapr, Pando and Exaroom are all fairly recent entrants.

AllPeers

We’ve followed Prague/UK based AllPeers from the very beginning, and are very familiar with this product.

Allpeers, which is apparently launching imminently (but is not live as of the time of this post), is a Firefox plugin that uses bittorent technology to complete file transfers. You add friends to your AllPeers network and then send and receive files from them. The interface is intuitive, and there are no restrictions on file sizes or amounts transferred. AllPeers is incredibly easy to use, allows transfers of files and/or folders, and works on any machine that you can run Firefox. We also stressed tested the product by transferring very large files and shutting down Firefox and then the computer itself during tranfer. AllPeers picked up where it left off as soon as Firefox was reopened, which is great.

Like the others, AllPeers is free. But, unlike Pando and Zapr, AllPeers completes file transfers without the need to confirm via email first. However, all sides of the transfer must have AllPeers installed on Firefox.

Zapr

Sydney and Singapore based Zapr , which we profiled here, opened up for public beta testing earlier this week – you can sign up here.

Zapr is a downloadable application that looks and feels a lot like an instant messaging client. You can drag files into Zapr and send them to an email address or Zapr username. The recipient(s) receives an email with a link to the file. Clicking on the link initiates a download of the file through the browser. There are no limits on file size.

Zapr is not using bittorent on the backend and does not upload the file to its servers before transfer. The file is transferred directly from one computer to the other, and requires that the sender be online for the file to transfer properly. This also means that if a user shares a file with 100 people, that will trigger 100 distinct downloads from that user’s computer which will hog bandwidth and very likely crush individual transfers. For that reason, Zapr is not really a private sharing network, but really an easy way to initiate a one-to-one transfer. We also had problems restarting a transfer when it was stopped. Also, anyone who gets access to the link can download the file.

Zapr is built on the .NET platform and therefore is only available for use on Windows machines.

All in all, we like the Zapr user interface but its current limitations make it significantly less useful than AllPeers or Pando. Of note is the fact that, of the four services, Zapr is the only one that doesn’t require recipients to have the Zapr software installed on their computer.

Pando

Pando, based in New York, recently reached 1 million downloads of its software. Pando is a desktop application that runs on Windows or Mac machines. Users drag files into the application and tell it the email address of who to send it to. Multiple recipients are fine, and Pando can transfer folders or files.

Pando has an intelligent, bittorent based back end. When you send a file, the first thing Pando does is upload it to its servers. Recipients receive the file directly from the sender as well as the Pando servers, and if there are multiple recipients then the bittorent efficiency effect really kicks in as all recipients also become senders.

Recipients receive an email and initiate a transfer by opening a small attachment (you must have Pando to download the file).

Pando is an efficient and user friendly service. We’d like to see it initiate transfers without the need to click on an email attachment, and the addition of buddy lists would be a good way to ease the annoyance of re-typing the email address of someone you often share with.

Exaroom

San Francisco based exaroom, which launched in late July 2006, is a Windows only service that requires a download. Once installed, a user can share files within their My Documents folder with other exaroom users. New shared files are viewable through the application interface, and downloads are completed via the browser download manager.

Exaroom is a good way to make your My Documents folder permanently sharable with certain friends, but the lack of features compared to the other services make it a less useful product.

Summary

All four of these services are useful tools for sharing large files with a trusted network.

Each is useful for different goals. However, a popular service that we excluded from this review, yousendit (profiled here), also solves the basic need to transfer a large file to another person or group of people. If you are looking to create a long term sharing network, Allpeers is the way to go. It has platform flexibilty (works on Windows, Linux and Mac), allows creation of buddy lists that allow easy multiple transfers over time, and does not require the use of email to confirm file downloads.

Thanks to Nick Gonzalez for research assistance on this post.

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.

UK/Prague-based AllPeers is a Firefox extension that will allow for group P2P file sharing using the browser. A persistent buddy list in a sidebar is created. Files can be shared with those buddies by dragging a file, folder or URL into their name. It’s just as easy to share the file with multiple people. The core technology is based on bittorent.

We’ve followed Allpeers through the initial rumors, first public screenshots and their March venture funding by Mangrove Capital and Index Ventures.

They’ve kept quiet recently, saying they’ve been making small changes to their interface and big changes to their infrastructure to handle scaling issues at launch. I’ve been testing the product with co-founder Matthew Gertner – this is going to be a very popular application. Very large (video) files transfered in my tests without difficulty, including after repeatedly shutting down the browser mid-transfer. Like other bittorent clients, the transfer picked back up again after relaunch.

The company won’t say when they are launching, but they’ve been bleeding in beta users for a few weeks and the date is clearly not that far away. They’ve also said they’ll allow me to give 50 300 immediate access accounts away immediately – these are first come, first serve in the comments. Just give me the email address you want to use, in the comment.

A potential competitor in this space is Zapr, which we recently covered. Zapr is handling file sharing via a stand alone client. AllPeers says they’ll have a non-browser client as well, later this year.

Uk/Czech Republic based AllPeers, a yet to be launched firefox extension for the peer to peer sharing of files that I am absolutely in love with, is announcing a Series A round of venture capital tomorrow. Investors include Mangrove Capital Partners and Index Ventures. No word on the size of the investment.

My previous posts on AllPeers, including screen shots of the product, are at this link (just scroll down).

Ok guys, you have the funding and the hot eastern European dev team. Will you please launch? And I really hope you build an extension for Flock as well, because that will be my default browser as soon as it launches.

Prague based Allpeers cofounder Matthew Gertner came by my house today to install the product and let me try it out.

Allpeers is a Firefox extension that creates a simple, persistent buddy list in the browser. Initially, interaction with those buddies will be limited to discovering and sharing files – If you choose to, you can share any file on your network with one or more of your friends. They will be able to see what files you choose to share (even getting an RSS feed of new files you include), and with a single click download it to their own hard drive.

See my original post on Allpeers for more information.

Matt took me through installation and setup of the product, and he shared a number of files with me. The interface for adding friends and sharing files is intuitive. Adding a file into Allpeers requires only dragging it from the hard drive into the browser, and sharing the file requires only a single click.

The service is not yet freely available, and Matt says that 35,000 people have requested to be notified by email when the service goes live.

As I wrote before, Allpeers is the “Killer App” for Firefox – Mozilla based Flock and Songbird should immediately be working to convert the basic Allpeers extension to work on their platforms as well.

Allpeers will be launching by the end of March 2006.

I’ve had a chance to talk to AllPeers founders Cedric Maloux and Matthew Gertner. This company is set to take the world by storm. In my opinon this single firefox extension will massively increase the attractiveness of that already popular browser, drawing more millions away from embattled Internet Explorer.

AllPeers is a simple, persistent buddy list in the browser. Initially, interaction with those buddies will be limited to discovering and sharing files – If you choose to, you can share any file on your network with one or more of your friends. They will be able to see what files you choose to share (even getting an RSS feed of new files you include), and with a single click download it to their own hard drive.

AllPeers will work even when the sharer is offline – AllPeers is a bittorent client, and will allow files to be pulled from multiple sources. When downloading, the file may be grabbed partially or fully from others you have shared it with (or who shared it with you). So a user just clicks on a file, and waits for it to eventually download. Screen shots can be viewed here.

With AllPeers, I can share photos and home movies with my parents, songs (and anything else) with friends, and also access the files that they choose to share.

In the future, AllPeers will also have folders to allow public sharing (probably with restrictions to control copyright violations). I also assume they will build chat and VOIP functionality into the application as well.

AllPeers will not be advertising funded. There are hints that the business model may eventually be centered on monetization of paid content, but that will be down the road. For now, they are focused on launching with the basic shared-folder approach. And that is fine with me – I’ll be hooked from the second I can get my hands on it.

AllPeers has seven employees, is based in Prague and is a UK company. They are self and angel funded to date. If you’d like to sign up for the beta, enter your email here. An initial batch of beta testers should get their hands on it later this month.

Thanks Greg and Jordan for telling me about this.

Here’s the second set of companies that presented at the Web 2.0 conference Launchpad workshop. See Part 1 here.

Zvents

My friend Ethan Stock showed off Zvents, which launched last night. We’ve written about zvents here and here. In a nutshell, Zvents helps you create and locate the tens of thousands of monthly local events and has tons of awesome ajax, tagging and other web2.0 stuff.

KnowNow

Ron Rasmussen talked about KnowNow, an interesting RSS-based alert system (they call it “elerts”). I’d like to understand this one better and am hoping to sit down with Ron this week.

Orb

Ian McCarthy gave us a tantalizing presentation on Orb, which allows you to stream content from your home computer to any wifi device without the need for any hardware. It works extremely well for video, photos, etc. He even pulled up a video cam in his living room and used Orb to turn the light on. Cool. It’s PC only right now though.

Wink

Michael Tanne took the password protections off Wink today so we could finally get a look. Wink is “people powered search” and methinks they are on to something powerful. They take basic search results and allow people to tag and rank them to create a much better result set. They’ve called their technology “tagrank”.

Damnit, Michael, answer my emails and give me an interview tomorrow.

Allpeers

Matthew Gertner presented on allpeers, an open platform to develop applications on firefox. Allpeers is in private beta currently.

Flock

Bart Decrem gave a Flock demo. What more can I say about Flock? I love it in a way that isn’t natural. If they could find a way to integrate Pandora direclty into the Flock browser, I’d never leave my computer again.

But seriously, I’ve got my hands on the new version and will do a full profile this week.

PubSub

Founder Bob Wyman spoke about PubSub, structured blogging and their new LinkRanks product, which we wrote about here. More on PubSub, our favorite prospective search engine, here.