Darknets

This is where I think p2p is heading:

Version 1 (Napster, Kazaa) was about trading their media — copyrighted music and Hollywood content.

Version 2 (Blubster, WASTE) was about taking this activity into the Darknet.

Version 3 — which we're seeing in each of these new Darknet applications — is about collaboration among peers, in a secure, private fashion. It's about sharing our media and data — the video, music, audio files, photos and GPS data that we've created ourselves.

For more on what darknets are, see this backgrounder from my book, or Wikipedia's take.

Here are a few darknets worth a look -- private, encrypted spaces where social groups can communicate with each other and exchange files to some extent. Some are full-blown companies, other examples are just software apps written by coders ticked off at the courts for shutting down Napster.

Darknets

Grouper

Company: 15 people, headquarters in Mill Valley, CA; $1.5 million in funding.

Lowdown: PC World gave Grouper 4 stars out of 5; CNET, 5 out of 5. I met founder Dave Samuel at a Media Center event last fall. Samuel said the four “golden rules” of Grouper are:

- Share everything
- Play fair
- Don’t take things that are not yours
- Be aware of wonder

“One thing that always frustrated me was the [lack of] ability to share media with my friends, to share files. You can email some files -- but with constraints,” Samuel said. “With peer to peer and the nature of the broadband world, people naturally share many things, including media files.”

Limitation: You can invite up to 30 people into a private darknet. You can stream, but not download, music files.

Geek quotient: low. Normal people can do this.

Cost: free. Ad-supported.

imeem

Company: 10 people, with headquarters in Cupertino, CA

Lowdown: A free desktop app that lets you create personal, private networks with your friends and family. Includes chat, file sharing, photo sharing, search, forums and more with an attractive interface. I've used it, but haven't mastered it yet. Business Week Online was mightily impressed. imeem got a recent facelift for its version 1.0, which I wrote about here.

Limitations: You can invite up to 30 people to join one of your private networks.

Geek quotient: low

Cost: Free. Advertiser-supported.

SpinXpress

Outhink makes SpinXpress, a small app that has been around in corporate settings for a few years and is now being optimized and expanded in hope of reaching both the consumer and business market.

SpinXpress is a free software app that lets you webcast (video, audio, or blogs) and collaborate with your friends, family or associates. I've already used it a half-dozen times with friends and business associates to share large files, given that Google Gmail and Yahoo mail cap the size of files you can send at 10 MB or less. You can transfer large files with Skype and most IM apps as well, but those don't always work smoothly. It's much easier to drag and drop, say, a dozen photos into the SpinXpress window and email a message to another party to alert her that she can snag your photos or videos without even having to download the application.

Toole says the application has super-military encryption borne out by tests in corporate environments.

Limitations: More of a collaborative tool than a dark social space, there are no limitations on the number of people in a group you create.

Geek quotient: low

Cost: Free.

WiredReach

WiredReach is both a darknet application and an open source platform that can be extended by anyone, says founder Ashish Maurya, who blogs here. As the site says:

The WiredReach Platform, built on a set of open standards and technologies (Eclipse, JXTA, RSS, RDF, XMPP), allows users to selectively share “content” with others in a completely decentralized and secure manner. We use the term “content” very loosely to include things like presence, blogs, bookmarks, documents, calendars, music, photos… virtually any type of social media.

Traditional content sharing and collaboration applications are typically built using proprietary protocols and/or as closed networks which limit their applicability and scope. Our goal, instead, is to take an open network approach and enable what we call the “User-Centric Web” - one that blurs the boundaries between the desktop and the web and that can be extended by anyone.

Navizon

Mexens Technology co-founder James P.W. Parsons says, "as P2P file sharing networks are to music, Navizon is to GPS data — except we're about a legal as it gets."

Navizon, released in mid-August 2005, is a free P2P "wireless positioning system" that successfully blends GPS, cellular and wi-fi technologies -- together into one accurate "mobile geo-location" system and service.

If you have a GPS device, Navizon will map the wireless landscape (wi-fi access points and cell towers) everywhere you go and then this use this data to improve the accuracy and performance of your navigation within dense urban settings, indoors and even underground. GPS users now have accurate coverage in places they never did before and when they don't have their GPS devices with them. Once you sync your location data to the Navizon Network, it's available to all Navizon members worldwide.

If you don't have a GPS device, Navizon lets you accurately navigate cities, streets and neighborhoods using just your Pocket PC's wi-fi and/or cell capabilities — without having to purchase an expensive GPS device or to pay hefty monthly fees to a cell phone carrier network.

Haxial KDX

From their website:

KDX is like a swiss army knife for internet and intranet communications. KDX is a powerful multi-OS "BBS"-style (Bulletin Board System) encrypted internet communications system that provides voice chat (Internet Telephone), text chat, messaging, news, file and folder transfer, remote access, trackers and more. It uses strong encryption to protect your communications for security and privacy. It is very useful for groups that need to collaborate on a project via the Internet. It is also very useful for remote administration of a computer. KDX uses a client/server architecture (NOT peer-to-peer).

Qnext

From the NY Times on Oct. 12, 2005:

Qnext, another private peer-to-peer network, also tries to distance itself from illegal users in the hope of building a successful business without setting off legal battles. The company packages its service as an all-in-one communications tool with instant messaging, video conferencing and Internet telephone service, as well as file sharing and an application that operates a PC remotely.

The Qnext software does not assist the development of groups of strangers, however, making it more difficult to disseminate copyrighted entertainment widely. A company spokesman, Simon Plashkes, said this limitation rendered Qnext useless as a piracy tool. "If someone was sharing a movie, it would be hard to send that to more than five people," Mr. Plashkes said. "The technical design is not the best piracy platform." Even in more public forums, like virtual communities, users increasingly want to share files as well as photos; administrators have responded by developing safeguards against misuse.

I2P

At the Badcomedown blog, Roamerick writes:

I2P [is] a fast growing and technologically capable darknet application that's just about ready to test some mass usage. With a current total of around 600 nodes, I2P has already achieved some underground notoriety as the one to watch, and is now ready to take on some more users. Featuring its own anonymous BitTorrent client, an Azureus plugin, IRC support and an I2P-enabled version of the Phex gnutella client, I2P is covering all the key bases it needs to gather momentum. The one thing still missing is content. Users wanting to be at the vanguard of darknet evolution should give a thought to populating I2P, running a node and publishing content to enrich the network.

Other darknets:

WASTE, an encrypted p2p application meant chiefly for secure communication rather than file sharing. Created by code wunderkind Justin Frankel, it has no business model. Which isn't a bad thing. Geek quotient: high.

Freenet, a project started by Ian Clarke when he was a student at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. I profile Ian and Freenet in Darknet, though Ian is currently working on a new project. Geek quotient: fairly high.

Groove Networks: a secure encrypted corporate network founded by Ray Ozzie, who was recently named CTO of Microsoft.

More to come.