Today these 6 softwares are the most used softwares in the world in terms of internet bandwidth consumed about 60%. And in the future these softwares or these categories of softwares will consume about 90% of the world internet bandwidth. A situation which most ISP’s are trying to overcome.
1) Usenet
2) eDonkey
3) BitTorrent
4) Skype
5) MetaASO Mermaid
6) Faroo
Usenet was conceived by Duke University students Tom Trustcott and Jim Ellis. I quote from Wikipedia “Usenet is distributed among a large, constantly changing conglomeration of servers which store and forward messages to one another. These servers are loosely connected in a variable mesh. Individual users usually read from and post messages to a local server operated by their ISP, university or employer. The servers then exchange the messages between one another, so that they are available to readers beyond the original server.” The most commonly used feature of Usenet is its capability of Binary Attachments. Any news item could contain files. And this feature is used to transfer files between people around the globe.
I quote from Wikipedia “The eDonkey network (also known as the eDonkey2000 network or eD2k) is a decentralized, mostly server-based, peer-to-peer filesharing network best suited to share big files among users, and to provide long term availability of said files. In practical terms, it is mostly used to share video files, full music albums and computer programs. Like most file sharing networks, it is decentralized, as there is not any central hub for the network; also, files are not stored on a central server but are exchanged directly between users based on the peer-to-peer principle.” Though Napster was the most famous P2P network of its time but it was closed down due to legal lawsuits. eDonkey is a commercial software while there are other free softwares like eMule, Kazaa and Limewire which are used by users which work on similar principles.
BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer program developed by Bram Cohen and BitTorrent Inc. used for uploading and downloading files via the BitTorrent Protocol. BitTorrent was the first client written for the protocol. Other clients are Azureus and uTorrent. When you want to share a file you have to create a Torrent file for it and register it with a Tracker Website. Then you can post the torrent on any website or share it with your friends who can add the Torrent file to a BitTorrent client. Which will then download the file for you. The process of creating a torrent is a bit involved and hence softwares like eDonkey are preferred over BitTorrent by most users. For example in eMule you can drop your file into the client and you will get a link which you can directly share with your friends.
Skype is a P2P Voice-Over-IP software created by Niklas Zenstromm and Janus Friis. It allows users to call their friends over the internet. It was the first VOIP software which worked in a P2P fashion without using any central servers. It also allows calling PSTN numbers through its client for a small charge. It was innovative in many senses for example it used a Distributed Hashtable for authentication and authorization.
MetaASO Mermaid is the only item in this list which is not the name of a software but rather the name of a product suite. It contains about 20 products of which 5 have been released. It was created in 2002 by Aditya Yadav and his friends from IIT’s, MIT and Stanford. These softwares are used to broadcast News, Realtime Video, Webconferencing and other things. These softwares absolutely don’t use any servers and can concurrently by used by a billion people around the globe. Mermaid is for Realtime Global Broadcasts what Skype is to Internet Telephony.
FAROO is a program, that implements web search based on Peer-to-peer technology. After the program is downloaded and installed, the searcher becomes part of a world wide distributed search engine. Every web page visited is automatically included in the index of the search engine. The ranking of search results is based on a distributed usage statistics of the web pages visited by FAROO users. Faroo is doing to search what Kazaa & eDonkey did to filesharing.
1) Usenet
2) eDonkey
3) BitTorrent
4) Skype
5) MetaASO Mermaid
6) Faroo
Usenet was conceived by Duke University students Tom Trustcott and Jim Ellis. I quote from Wikipedia “Usenet is distributed among a large, constantly changing conglomeration of servers which store and forward messages to one another. These servers are loosely connected in a variable mesh. Individual users usually read from and post messages to a local server operated by their ISP, university or employer. The servers then exchange the messages between one another, so that they are available to readers beyond the original server.” The most commonly used feature of Usenet is its capability of Binary Attachments. Any news item could contain files. And this feature is used to transfer files between people around the globe.
I quote from Wikipedia “The eDonkey network (also known as the eDonkey2000 network or eD2k) is a decentralized, mostly server-based, peer-to-peer filesharing network best suited to share big files among users, and to provide long term availability of said files. In practical terms, it is mostly used to share video files, full music albums and computer programs. Like most file sharing networks, it is decentralized, as there is not any central hub for the network; also, files are not stored on a central server but are exchanged directly between users based on the peer-to-peer principle.” Though Napster was the most famous P2P network of its time but it was closed down due to legal lawsuits. eDonkey is a commercial software while there are other free softwares like eMule, Kazaa and Limewire which are used by users which work on similar principles.
BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer program developed by Bram Cohen and BitTorrent Inc. used for uploading and downloading files via the BitTorrent Protocol. BitTorrent was the first client written for the protocol. Other clients are Azureus and uTorrent. When you want to share a file you have to create a Torrent file for it and register it with a Tracker Website. Then you can post the torrent on any website or share it with your friends who can add the Torrent file to a BitTorrent client. Which will then download the file for you. The process of creating a torrent is a bit involved and hence softwares like eDonkey are preferred over BitTorrent by most users. For example in eMule you can drop your file into the client and you will get a link which you can directly share with your friends.
Skype is a P2P Voice-Over-IP software created by Niklas Zenstromm and Janus Friis. It allows users to call their friends over the internet. It was the first VOIP software which worked in a P2P fashion without using any central servers. It also allows calling PSTN numbers through its client for a small charge. It was innovative in many senses for example it used a Distributed Hashtable for authentication and authorization.
MetaASO Mermaid is the only item in this list which is not the name of a software but rather the name of a product suite. It contains about 20 products of which 5 have been released. It was created in 2002 by Aditya Yadav and his friends from IIT’s, MIT and Stanford. These softwares are used to broadcast News, Realtime Video, Webconferencing and other things. These softwares absolutely don’t use any servers and can concurrently by used by a billion people around the globe. Mermaid is for Realtime Global Broadcasts what Skype is to Internet Telephony.
FAROO is a program, that implements web search based on Peer-to-peer technology. After the program is downloaded and installed, the searcher becomes part of a world wide distributed search engine. Every web page visited is automatically included in the index of the search engine. The ranking of search results is based on a distributed usage statistics of the web pages visited by FAROO users. Faroo is doing to search what Kazaa & eDonkey did to filesharing.
