Solo Technology

I’ve mentioned AllPeers a few times in the past and recently received my closed beta invite. Part of the invite was the chance to get a few friends invited as well (after all, can’t share alone!). I know for sure one friend installed, but not sure about the others. But moot point as I uninstalled it last week for a variety of reason.

Reason 1: Turns out I really don’t need a persistent or full-time file sharing setup. I just don’t do it enough! I usually get by uploading the file to my web server.

That being said, I do have an invite to the current incarnation of Zapr that I’m looking forward to trying out (previous mention). I don’t even know if I’d consider it a competitor of AllPeers — while the end result is the same, they both work quite differently.

Not to keep side-tracking, but other interesting services in this space might include Pando, dropload or even YouSendIt. I haven’t tried any of those, but all 3 look interesting.

Reason 2: I think the AllPeers firefox extension was giving me some grief. And as a bad beta-tester, I didn’t take the time to track down what the scenario truly was. I was having some odd CPU spikes and memory usage that seem to have gone away since the uninstall, so for now I’m shrugging and moving on. Maybe it was AllPeers and maybe it wasn’t.

Reason 3: Firefox only. Not that I don’t like Firefox - I do! But I also like Opera and IE7beta. Or I equally hate them all, whichever way you wish to look at it.

So apologies to the AllPeers crew, this is one product that I just won’t be beta’ing well. I’m just not in the target demographic I suspect.

3 Responses to “Not an AllPeers Review”

1. Rich G. on August 5th, 2006 4:37 pm
   

   Reason 2: I think the AllPeers firefox extension was giving me some grief… Maybe it was AllPeers and maybe it wasn’t.

   I think it was. I would even get Firefox hanging completely for a minute at a time. All that went away when I uninstalled AllPeers.

   I also agree with Reason 1.

   I’m surprised you didn’t mention box.net as another file sharing alternative as you can share files with another box.net person whether they’re online or not, just click a box and it’ll virtually chuck it over into their box.net account so they have a copy when they log on. It’s pretty handy actually… sorta like somebody leaving you a folder of stuff in your “inbox” when you’re out of the office.

2. chris on August 6th, 2006 10:26 am
   

   Rich, I had a similar issue. At one point I closed all my tabs, minimized FF and it was still holding onto approx 120MB. That behavior went away after I uninstalled AP.

   Ya know, the box.net thing had escaped me. For whatever reason, I hadn’t noticed that in the past. Neato!

3. Matthew Gertner on August 7th, 2006 5:29 am
   

   Hi, I’m the CTO of AllPeers. Thanks for your comments. Obviously AllPeers is one of those products that really comes into its own when it reaches a certain critical mass. It’s not that exciting if you only have 1-2 buddies in your contact list.

   Seen in that light, I think that by far the biggest problem you mention is “reason 2″. Memory consumption is one of the main reasons that we are still in private beta. We’re working on this right now so expect significant progress. Assuming that AllPeers doesn’t use excessive sysem resources, I really don’t see “reason 1″ as an issue. Assuming that your friends have AllPeers too, you just leave it running in the background when you don’t need it. Note that you can also share webpages which is probably something that people do more often than sharing files.

   I’m not sure I understand “reason 3″. Why is it a problem for you if AllPeers only runs in Firefox? You can still go ahead and like IE and Opera!

   Cheers,
   Matt

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