Are you referring to the various implementations of DHTs, ISP caching protocol (BitTorrent), protocol scrambling feature (Azureus), extensions (like Azureus' download chat extention?). If i'm not mistaken, the baseline form doesn't change...
I'm actually talking about the monolithic BitTorrent "protocol" lump of many different pieces of functionality. There are IETF standards for file downloading, NAT/firewall traversal, and even resource publishing and lookup each of which better addresses the various pieces of BitTorrent functionality and each of which interoperates with more than just other BitTorrents out there. HTTP is the quintessential example. BitTorrent made the design decision to break interoperability with the entire rest of the Internet through not using HTTP for file transfers, making every web server out there an invalid source for a file. The reason is tit-for-tat and distributing updated source data, but those don't come anywhere near justifying it in my mind. File transfer, NAT negotiation, source publishing and lookup, etc, should all properly be separate protocols as they are in the IETF stack. And bittorrent is still the best big-file-download-on-clik method (on the
p2p side), at least for media content delivery or ISO downloading. The best one being in my opinion multi-source http downloading for corporate/commercial needs.
That's really just because of all the BitTorrent links out there. There's nothing really magical about it other than the fact that it downloads from multiple sources. Hopefully this ends with other clients outperforming BitTorrent in the
> market I'm sorry, weren't you talking about the protocol?
Right. I'm just saying that to reverse the trend towards BitTorrent's adoption as a protocol, someone needs to beat it in the market using the open protocol standards out there.
By the way, are there any similar protocols (in terms of instant single-file-downloading features) possibly in the research area, which may come in competition with BitTorrent in a near future ?
I'd say HTTP content range requests with even a basic source selection strategy. This is already there in other applications, but it just hasn't been pieced out into a parallel downloader like in BitTorrent. As for the downloading applet, i find this very interesting because the
mainstream computer users dont't want to/can't install/configure Bittorrent clients. It's the first time i see an approch of giving Bittorrent support to browsers (supporting Java), apart of Opera's plans to integrate it natively.
Yeah, I like that little project. Anyone on this list working on it? I'd be curious to chat. <http://lists.zooko.com/mailman/listinfo/p2p-hackers> -Adam
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