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・AllPeers | Firefox P2P Add-on

The story of AllPeers looked like thoses we’d like to cover more : a great concept, in touch with today’s pulse (P2P filesharing right from your browser), an A-list of investors and advisors (Mangrove Capital and Index Ventures, the same fairies that were at the cradle of Skype), and a shelve-full of awards ( mentions in Webware 100, CNET, Wired, etc.)

Unfortunately, the service was shut down abruptly this March, 3rd (announcement on the aptly named company blog “PeerPressure”). Lack of funding, itself linked to lack of user take-up, are the early explanatory reasons for this failure, which was amply covered by TechCrunch (formerly quite hot on the company), Ars Technica, CNET, etc.

I find it more interesting to look at it after the dust has settled a bit, a read from Matthew Gertner, one of the founders and CTO about his lessons learned :

• raise as much as you can
• be pessimistic about the technical challenges
• question the advantages/challenges balance in the case of P2P for consumer services

Lastly, Matt praises the open source side of the adventure :

On a more positive note, a decision I will never regret was our choice to implement AllPeers as an open source product on top of Mozilla.

For those who wondered, the founders have apparently no hard feelings towards their VC, Mangrove :

This shouldn’t be construed as a criticism of Mangrove Capital Partners, who led our series A investment round. They are a fantastic group of individuals whom I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend to any entrepreneur seeking funding, and a classic example of a VC who really does offer much more than money to a budding startup (something they all claim to do).

All in all, the founders seem to have keep their entrepreneurial spirit intact through this rough wave, quoting Obi-Wan Kenobi : ““If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.“

Update: Truthful to the last sentence, Matthew Gertner is coming back with an in-depth analysis of bridging the web and desktop applications, with a review of Single-Site Browsers, compared to Adobe AIR. A hint of things to come ?

Τέλος έβαλαν στο AllPeers οι συντελεστές του. Με σχετική ανακοίνωση στο επίσημο blog της υπηρεσίας αναφέρουν ότι η βάση χρηστών που δημιουργήθηκε δεν ήταν ικανή να προκαλέσει το ενδιαφέρον των επενδυτών για περαιτέρω επενδύσεις στην υπηρεσία αυτή.

Το AllPeers, η υπηρεσία που πολλοί αγάπησαν (κι εγώ βέβαια) αποτελεί πλέον παρελθόν για την κοινότητα του ευρύτερου P2P. Για όσους δεν γνώριζαν τι ήταν το AllPeers να πω ότι ήταν ένα add on για τον Firefox στο οποίο μπορούσε να έχει ένας χρήστης τις προσωπικές του επαφές. Κατόπιν μπορούσαμε να διαμοιραστούμε αρχεία η φακέλους με επαφές της αρεσκείας μας.

Το ωραίο στην όλη υπηρεσία που την χρησιμοποιούσα πολύ καιρό τώρα ήταν ότι οι επαφές μου είχαν ενημέρωση για το ποια αρχεία ήθελα να διαμοιραστώ μαζί τους χωρίς εγώ να είμαι μπροστά στον υπολογιστή μου. Με αυτόν τον τρόπο υπήρχε ταχύτητα στην μεταξύ μας ενημέρωση.

Το AllPeers ήταν ίσως ο καλύτερος τρόπος για private P2P μέσα σε στενό κύκλο επαφών της επιλογής σας.

A very thoughtful reader offered up an inspiring quotation in his comment yesterday to our recent post on AllPeers, Good Lessons in One Graceful Failure.
We think it is worth promoting. Matt wrote in to say…

I know that this quote is used a lot, but it sits above my desk:

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
– Teddy Roosevelt

By definition, founders live “in the arena.” So here’s to you! We suggest you paste TR’s words to your wall, too.

And thanks, Matt!

We posted yesterday on the failure of AllPeers. This is an evergreen topic on founders’ sites like ours, failure being an experience all of us will have at one point or another. But failure—like success!—is ‘what you make of it.’ As we learned yesterday, it needn’t be all bad. I’ve had this on my mind the last 24 hours, so when I ran across the Waitley quotation, below, I thought it worth passing on:

“Forget about the consequences of failure. Failure is only a temporary change in direction to set you straight for your next success.”

– Denis E. Waitley, management and leadership consultant and best-selling author of Seeds of Greatnesss: The Ten Best-Kept Secrets of Total Success and The Psychology of Winning.

For those interested, we’ve listed Waitley’s 10 ‘Greatness Seeds’ on the jump …

1) Self-Esteem
2) Creativity
3) Responsibility
4) Wisdom (expressed as reflecting on your integrity)
5) Sense of Purpose
6) Communication
7) Faith (in this case, he means optimism) Adaptability (cultivating coping skills for stress)
9) Perseverance
10) Perspective

For more, read an excerpt of Waitley’s book on Amazon here.

File this one in the “definitely interesting” category: Niko, commenting on the financially-driven shutdown of the AllPeers file-sharing service:

1. Open source the server side code, so AllPeers will survive every economic war in the future.
   Comment by NiKo — 3/3/2008 @ 10:08 pm

Wow. I’ve never heard of software-for-profit (or is he talking about capitalism generally?) described as “economic war”.  As a kid you learn the phrase “creative destruction” but, economic war?  As in dead people?

Of course war as a euphemism isn’t strictly about dead people: witness the endless round-ball-as-glorious-combat quotes coming out of your neighborhood football player.   But I gather that Niko meant “war” as more literal than a sports metaphor, and maybe just a tad less literal than what’s going on in Iraq: i.e. deadly serious stuff.

Equally hard to peg is my reaction: I’m midway between dismissive and accepting — call me intrigued by the metaphor.  It has a certain spice to it.

What do you think?  Is it really war out there?

Many people have fallen in love with the AllPeers service, and I rest drove a Firefox extension for the service last year. But today they announced that they are closing their doors for good.

As posed on the AllPeers blog

 It is with deep regret that we inform our users, friends and fans that we will be shutting down the AllPeers service today. We are tremendously proud of the product that our team has built, and we remain convinced of the potential of adding social features like file sharing to the web browser. However, we have not achieved the kind of growth in our user base that our investors were expecting, and as a result we are not able to continue operating the service.

While  I didn’t find much use for AllPeers myself, I know that many ofthe people I respect with theMozilla community kove it, and for the sake of those who have come to find AllPeers not only worth using but worth pimpingit to their friends and colleagues I am sorryt to see it go.

You can read the full announcement on the AllPeers blog. Thanks to Planet Mozilla for bringing this onto my radar so I could pass it along.

AllPeers, a personal P2P file-sharing startup based in Oxford, England, is down for the count. The company founders announced on AllPeers’ blog about the startup’s plans to shut down.

The personal P2P file-sharing space is a crowded one; not many companies can claim success. AllPeers tried to get traction by going open source back in March 2007, but that failed to boost their growth.

Co-founder Matthew Gertner emailed Liz Gannes with this response to her query:

Basically our investors had certain expectations in terms of user base growth. We were very happy with the adoption of the product but they weren’t. When we ran out of cash they weren’t willing to provide additional funding, so we have no choice but to shut the service down.

The source code for our client is already open source, and we’re planning to put it up on an independent site like SourceForge or Google Code in case it can be of use to others. We’re still deciding what to do with the server code, but there’s a good chance that we’ll decide to open source that as well.

AllPeers was backed by Index Ventures. I expect to see a brutal shakeout in this particular sector of the file-sharing business. The good news (if you can call it that) is that the AllPeers blog, “Peer Pressure,” is going to stay in business. I have enjoyed Matthew and Cedric’s writings and am glad to hear that they will still be sharing their viewpoints on everything from the web to P2P to startup life.

AllPeers è un tool per file-sharing che funziona direttamente nel tuo browser.Appena installato gli utenti, creeranno un pannello di tutti gli utenti in firefox.E’ veramente facile trasferire files ai contatti nella lista, basta solo trascinare il file nel browser.

Sito web: http://www.allpeers.com/

[FONTE]

“Adds new features, makes it easier to add friends and family to share files with, and combines Firefox web browser and the AllPeers add-on in a single download.

With previous versions of AllPeers it was somewhat difficult to try and get new friends and family connected to to your AllPeers file and data sharing network but, with the latest v0.60 release it has been bundled with Firefox to make it even easier to get others connected.

Instead of having to guide them through a new browser and plugin installation, it’s now been simplified to a one-step download operation. New users can now simultaneously switch to the more secure browser while gaining the ability to join a private file-sharing network with AllPeers.

They’ve also included a new feature that allows you to import your contacts from some of the more popular e-mail programs and sites like Outlook, Thunderbird, Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo so you don’t have to enter all of them by hand.”

More

AllPeers sounds like a great plugin to install here in Firefox (my browswer of choice). I just happen to also leave a comment here about the plugin. I wonder, will my browser start to act sluggish due to me installing it? If so, it won’t be popular here. In fact it will be ditched rather fast. I do think that it could be the app killer or the plugin must have if you are into p2p and chatting.