14 DAY TRIAL // BitTorrent, the company, has launched a very interesting new app/service simply dubbed Share. It is a file sharing app, meant as a way of sharing files with a few friends. It fills a special niche in the file sharing world, but it does it in a novel way.
Share uses BitTorrent, it makes sense considering its creator, but it uses it for private sharing, i.e. files you want to share with a few people not the world.
It is similar to Dropbox and cyberlockers in some ways, people are going to be using it in similar ways.
Users have to have the Share app installed on their computer. It's only available on Windows for now. If you want to share a file or folder, just drag and drop it over the app and then fill in the email addresses of those you want to share them with, or just pick from your Facebook friends.
Everything is completely free and there are no limits on file sizes or numbers. That makes sense, since it uses peer-to-peer technology, so there would be no costs for the company.
But using a pure peer-to-peer architecture wouldn't have worked for this app, shutting down your computer would have meant your friends no longer had access to the files.
Instead, Share uses a hybrid approach, it caches everything in the cloud, on Amazon, as a backup but also for a speed bump. This way, your friends will always have access to the files, since they're in the cloud at least, or they get faster downloads since they download from you and the cloud as well.
Share is an alpha release and there are some things to figure out, for example, how long does it store files in the cloud and so on. Eventually, when the technology matures, the app will be incorporated into uTorrent, the popular BitTorrent client that the company also makes.