Webware

Amidst the crowd of peer-to-peer file-sharing options comes an attempt to return file-sharing to its utilitarian roots and away from legal quagmires by emphasizing file-publishing. Free and open-source, LittleShoot is the brainchild of Adam Fisk, a LimeWire developer who wants LittleShoot to be "like Google for files instead of Web pages."

LittleShoot manages torrents as well as scouring the Web for most major file formats.

(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)

Where most P2P programs are standalone clients, LittleShoot is a browser plug-in like QuickTime or Shockwave that should work with all major browsers. It utilizes an AJAX-based interface at LittleShoot.org to search, publish, and download files. Once you've downloaded and installed the plug-in, it will take you to the LittleShoot.org search page unless you opt out. From there, entering any search term will return results with hits from YouTube, IsoHunt, Flickr, Yahoo, and LimeWire. A SafeSearch option attempts to restrict inappropriate content.

The most recent version introduces torrent-handling abilities. Check out any torrent site, download the torrent, and LittleShoot will automatically start downloading it. LittleShoot lacks advanced features like throttling, but for a basic set-it-and-forget-it torrent client, it's not too shabby. Helpful links on the side make it easy to Twitter or Facebook the torrent, and a drop-down menu gives you access to dozens more sharing options.

Non-torrent files found by LittleShoot will open in a new window, but can't be downloaded directly.

Unfortunately, the publishing option wasn't working when I tested it. When you click "Browse," you can search your hard drive for files to share. Once you've chosen a file, you can tag it--however, the JPG and WMV files I tried to upload didn't work. Even with these drawbacks, LittleShoot looks like an interesting attempt to demystify file-sharing by making it more accessible than it's been so far.

GigaTribe makes it easy to share folders with friends and family.

(Credit: Rick Broida)

Looking for an easy way to share photos, videos, and other files with your friends and family? GigaTribe for Windows creates private peer-to-peer networks so you can swap to your heart's content.

The basic service is free, but Cheapskate readers can get a three-month subscription to GigaTribe Ultimate.

Just click the preceding link, and follow the instructions. Once you've created your username, use this promo code: P3MCHS.

Presto! You've got a GigaTribe Ultimate account that's good for 90 days. If you want to keep it going after that, it'll cost you $4.99 monthly or $29.95 annually. You can also drop back to a free account, if you prefer.

What does Ultimate give you that free doesn't? Among other things: unlimited simultaneous downloads (versus just one at a time), a choice of authorization levels for shared folders, password protection for shared folders, access to your shared files from any Web browser, and tech support via e-mail.

I've tried lots of file-sharing software and services over the years, and while GigaTribe can be a little daunting, at first, it has some great features: unlimited sharing, unlimited file sizes, and live chat within the client. Want to learn more about the service? Here's a YouTube video that walks you through.

You've got until April 24 to sign up for this freebie. Mac users, sit tight: a beta test version is in the works. In the meantime, do you have a preferred file-swapping solution? Hit the Comments, and share your favorites.

Transferring a large file isn't always easy. When e-mail won't work (which it often doesn't for files of any heft), you can burn to a disc or send a file piecemeal, but neither option provides much value to the person who just needs your file now, and simply.

Online file-sharing services can transfer large files for you. To use these services, you upload your file to them, and then your recipient gets a link to the download. The file itself doesn't go through e-mail, just the link to it. Let's look at a few different products that perform this service.

Box.net
Box.net may be billed as a service designed for companies, but it's equally useful for consumers.

Overall, Box is extremely easy to use and its interface is second to none. After signing up for an account, you can upload a file of up to 1GB in size, add comments to it to provide some context for other users, and save it to a single folder or multiple folders on the site. Once the file is uploaded, you can e-mail or IM a Box link to others, who can then download that file to their local machine. You can even create a shared workspace and work together online. Whether it was uploading the file or using that shared workspace, Box provided me with an outstanding experience.

One of Box's best features is its customizable widget. After heading to its widgets page, you can upload files, customize the look and feel of your widget, and share it with others by embedding it in your Web site or blog. You can keep adding files until you hit the 1GB limit. It's a really neat feature and a great way to share files that you don't mind keeping unsecured. I created my widget (right) in under a minute.

Unfortunately, Box only provides 1GB of storage a 25MB upload limit for free. If you need more than that, the company charges $7.95 for 5GB of storage and 1GB uploads or $15 per user per month for businesses that want 15GB of storage and 1GB uploads.

Dropbox
Dropbox is similar to Box because it allows you to upload files and share those with others. But in order for them to see the files, the service requires you to add them as authorized users.

Once you sign up for Dropbox, you can immediately start uploading files and creating separate folders to control access to documents. Once a folder is created, you can share it with others by inputting their e-mail addresses into the sharing box on Dropbox. The service then sends those users a link to sign up and start sharing access to the folder.

Dropbox makes it easy to upload files.

(Credit: Dropbox)

Uploading files in Dropbox is simple and generally zippy. If you want to create a photo gallery that can be viewed by anyone, the site boasts a Photos section where you can upload pictures. And although it works as advertised, it doesn't compare to nicer galleries like those you'll find on Flickr.

One of the most compelling reasons to use Dropbox is its offline functionality. When you sign up, you can download the company's desktop client, which allows you to drag-and-drop files into it. Once complete, it syncs with your online account in the background while you work. It's an outstanding feature.

Dropbox also offers an attractive pricing model. Although it doesn't provide as many collaboration features as Box, it offers more capacity for free. In fact, you can upload up to 5GB for free. It costs $9.99 per month or $99 per year to have 53GB of storage.

Digitization has a disruptive effect on a wide range of industries, from music to software to publishing to...you name it. If it can be digitized, it can be disrupted.

It's therefore encouraging to see the music seemingly converging on a cool new-old model: an ASCAP (American Society of Composers, Authors, & Publishers)-like tax from one's Internet service provider that allows unlimited downloading of music.

Gerd Leonhard's recent presentation on the subject is the best I've seen yet, one that I'd recommend you review, even if you never stray from the software world to think about music:

Leonhard argues that digitization has made a control-based music economy impossible, forcing the industry to seek other ways to monetize music--ways that conform to digitization's abundance, rather than to the old idea of scarcity.

In a sign of things to come, the Isle of Man just approved "a single blanket fee (that) will cover unlimited download activity for all 80,000 or so...residents," as Ars Technica reports.

This follows a new trend toward "free" services, in which the music industry hides the cost of the music in the price of a separate service or device. It's oddly similar to trends I'm seeing in software.

This isn't the only model. As the Future of Music blog points out, some musicians, like Corey Smith, are finding that giving away music to drive more concert ticket sales can be a winning recipe. But while $4.2 million last year for Smith is a great return for an individual artist or band, it's not a great way to build an industry. I'd liken it to "lifestyle" software businesses that generate great revenue for their founders but provide little in the way of equity for other participants in the company's success.

So I think the "adoption tax" model is promising. The future is flat-rate: you subscribe, you forget about paying for individual transactions, you enjoy more music than you ever have before.

Evernote, a tool Rafe Needleman and I both use regularly to take notes and archive scanned documents, put out a new and useful feature early Wednesday. Now, when attaching a file to a note it will be available everywhere else once it's been synced. If a change is made to that file, those changes get updated in all other locations shortly thereafter, mimicking the behavior of creating and syncing text notes on the service.

While not being an official hard drive in the cloud, this step brings Evernote a little closer. You still have to attach your files to a note to get it into Evernote's servers, which is a far cry from a direct file uploader (which is still possible by sending files to your special Evernote e-mail address). Files are also capped to just 25MB per note, limiting you from attaching large video files.

To help sell the new feature, which is available to both free and paying premium members, Evernote is currently restricting the types of files free users are able to sync to images (including .INK), audio files, and PDFs. Premium users get support for "any" file type, which includes things like Microsoft Office documents and video files which fall under the 25MB cap.

On a side note, if you haven't tried this service out, you really should. Over Thanksgiving break I used it to archive several boxes of childhood photographs and knickknacks using this scanning method, and it was actually a lot of fun. Everything I scanned can be viewed from the service's iPhone app, or on the Web through its Web viewer where it can be published for others to see.

Users of the desktop applications for Windows and Mac will need to upgrade to make use of the new attachment feature.

Users of Evernote's desktop applications will need to update to get the new file attachment feature.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

A look at the new Dropio home page.

(Credit: Dropio)

Dropio, a file-sharing start-up that lets you easily toss anything from photos to phone calls in a "drop" (kind of like a virtual storage cabinet), has launched a new look.

The redesign makes the site look a little slicker, and certainly accentuates Dropio's "easy to use" mantra. It's also clearly a consumer-oriented product now--in comparison, the old design looks like a back-end content management system. That's good, because the company hopes to appeal to Luddites as well as techies. (For a business model, Dropio offers premium accounts that get rid of the 100MB free account storage limit.)

Feature-wise, it's pretty much the same, but Dropio's team has said that it's "about a thousand times more customizable and useful" thanks to a newly reorganized dashboard. They also say that the speed of the site should also be a notch higher.

GigaTribe, a Web 2.0 file-sharing service, announced Monday that it has launched its product to the U.S. market. The company's software will allow users to share photos, videos, music, and documents with other users over a private peer-to-peer network.

At its core, GigaTribe is much like other file-sharing sites on the Web that are being monitored by the RIAA and MPAA, but it creates a private network to keep them out. The service allows users to share any file for free and create a group that can send files back and forth.

Due to the inherent security risk that goes along with its business model, GigaTribe's executives pointed out that the company does its best to keep files secure. To do that, it allows users to assign friends into groups and allow them access to certain files. The company also encrypts all files to add an extra layer of security.

"Security is our top priority," Alexis Leseigneur, GigaTribe's CTO said in a statement. "When it comes to sharing your personal photos and videos, you need to be absolutely sure they will only be available to the appropriate contacts."

Although GigaTribe tries to make its free application sound compelling, it's the $29.95-per-year "Ultimate" product that packs most of the benefits. Aside from faster downloading and multidownloading capability, the Ultimate service provides remote access to the files, password protection on all files, and most importantly, group access management.

According to the company, the free version allows anyone to view files, while the Ultimate version gives users the ability to decide which groups can access certain files.

GigaTribe's service is available now on the company's site.

Access files on the go with Box.net's iPhone app.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

If you're done playing around with Google Earth for the iPhone, you might be interested in checking out something with some everyday utility. Last week Box.net dropped its iPhone application on the App Store. Just like the mobile Safari-friendly version of yore, this lets you access your cloud-stored files on the go, including documents, music, and movies.

The big difference is that this new version takes advantage of your phone's hardware, letting you upload snapped photos and keep an eye on any updates.

In the future, once Apple flips the switch on its live notification service this means you'll be able to keep track of file changes as they happen, which makes Box.net's collaborative features all the more attractive. Currently, the only way to see updates is to hit a big refresh button, which will show you any additions or edits to existing files since you launched it.

One thing to note is that while the tool lets you see all the files in your cloud storage folders, items must be specifically formatted to play back on the device. I tried to play several Quicktime files (including MP4s, which are supported), and got error messages. This may seem like a no-brainer, but if you're trying to view something important that hasn't been formatted correctly, you're out of luck.

That said, if you do have a properly formatted file, it plays great--and in full quality, meaning you don't even need to use iTunes to sync up your content if you're near a high-speed connection.

Box.net's iPhone app is completely free and available on the App Store. Box.net's service offers 1GB for free, with two paid monthly plans that cost $8 and $20 and offer 5GB and 15GB of space, respectively.

[via Macrumors iPhone blog]

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has released an open-source, cross-platform program designed to track your packets and determine if your ISP is throttling your connection to torrents, VoIP, and other legal, high-bandwidth consuming communications. Called "Switzerland" and licensed under the GPL, it's very much in an alpha state and is only a command-line tool at the moment. Also, you're going to have to compile it yourself--that's not the most challenging task, but this isn't a simple self-extracting app.

According to the EFF, Switzerland works by spotting IP packets that have been forged or modified between clients, informing you of the change, and providing you copies of the modified packets. "The software uses a semi-P2P, server-and-many-clients architecture. Whenever the clients send packets to each other, the server will attempt to determine if any of them were dropped, forged, or modified," says the Switzerland Web site.

As far as usage goes, the EFF says that Switzerland is compatible with NAT firewalls, although some NAT firewalls may have to be disabled to test the ISP in front of it, because of the modifications that some firewalls make to packets.

I do wonder at the logic of the name, though. Referencing the "neutral" country is cute, but what's going to happen when somebody tries to find the program through a search engine? Googling "Switzerland" returns 234 million results, give or take.

Anyway, Switzerland is not the first packet-testing program around. What is special about it, though, is that unlike, for example, the plug-in for the Vuze/Azureus torrent client, Switzerland isn't tied to any host program. The open-source license, combined with the backing of a visible group like the EFF and the building awareness in both politicians and the general public of what Net Neutrality is about, could have serious ramifications for combating false promises of Net Neutrality from ISPs like Comcast.