14 DAY TRIAL // Fear is what drives innovation, and after the latest frights in Gary Fung's day-to-day illegal existence, Hexagon.cc is what came out. Having been sued by many music and film companies, and later pursued by the police, the founder and creator of the IsoHunt torrent tracker has revealed his new project, Hexagon.cc, a stint at making social-friendly torrent sites.
Hexagon was rolled out today, September 3, 2009, with an announcement made on the IsoHunt main page. Along with the official release, a link containing limited invitations was given to first-come first-served users. Other invitations (3,500) were issued through the Torrent Freak blog.
On this new generation torrent tracker, IsoHunt admins have gone social-crazy, incorporating many features reminding a user of popular sites like Facebook, YouTube or hi5. Users can organize themselves into groups (movie sharing group, Britney Spears sharing group, Softpedia scripts sharing group, etc.) and search torrents in that group's pool, aside from the classic global search.
“The main difference that sets Hexagon.cc apart from other social file sharing and BitTorrent sites, is everything is centered around groups. Be it file sharing networks or flash video sites, a key piece we found missing is social context,” said Gary Fung founder of Hexagon.cc and IsoHunt.
Members of a group will also have the possibility of sharing a torrent file inside a specific group only, making it more user-following centered, and a good opportunity for businesses to get in the action. Even Gary Fung has admitted that some companies have shown interest in this feature, “We have contacts with game publishers and independent musicians and film makers, who are very interested in creating their own groups where they can directly market their music, videos or games and interact with their fans, and generate sales directly or indirectly,” Fung said for the Torrent Freak blog.
Judging by the website's design only, we can see a massive improvement from the classic “tracker look” buried in ads or various commercials. Hexagon has a cool and sleek look with good white-space management, modern graphics and a lot of AJAX interactions.
The website also features a unique members-invite feature that will help admins protect Hexagon against the army of spam-bots and hackers wanting to make o profit through the website. Using the invitational system, admins can pinpoint the original hacked account, and can simply delete all the accounts invited by the compromised member.
This latest business venture, even if it's trying to legalize torrent subscriptions, will surely not protect Gary against his tumultuous past.