A year ago, Michael Arrington of Techcrunch claimed that Allpeers, would be the “killer app” that would “take the world by storm”. The response to the file sharing Firefox extension has not been as loud as expected, which is surprising if you take a closer look at Allpeers. This application allows you to share files and folders with your friends thanks to P2P technology. You can drag and drop elements from your desktop into your Allpeers page in your browser and you can write a message to accompany your shared file.
The big reason that Allpeers didn’t take off is probably that you had to convince people to install it to be able to use it with them. Allpeers have just released version 0.60, that aims to solve this issue. The new version imports your contacts automatically from big mail services like Outlook, Yahoo, Gmail or Hotmail. It can also keep the hierarchy of your shared folders and automatically backs up your database before updating. The real innovation though is that you can now get a version of Firefox with Allpeers bundled into it. As the Allpeers blog puts it:
So when you share by email with unenlightened folks who don’t even have Firefox yet (the humanity!) they can get it together with AllPeers in a single convenient download.
With the next version of Firefox expected to have even more extensions built into it, this is probably the opportunity for Allpeers to make its place in the sun. The real question though is if the “normal user” will get around to using Allpeers, or if he’ll stick with sending files by email as usual. With services like Gmail offering bigger attachment sizes, my guess is Allpeers is going to have a hard time.
