New Bittorrent Service Aims to Make Sharing Files Easy

There are about a million file sharing services out there, ranging from the legit to the less so. Bittorrent (the company founded by Bittorrent creator Bram Cohen) plans on stepping into the ring, bringing its knowledge of an infrastructure-less infrastructure to the field.

While Bittorrent has become synonymous with piracy, it really is hard to underestimate the scale of the network. Relying purely on ad hoc connections, with no oversight and the easy ability to access files, Bittorrent has created a network with over 100 million users, with more on at any given moment than on Facebook and Youtube combines, sharing an archive of an estimated 20 petabytes of data.

And this entire infrastructure was made for almost nothing. If this network was to be built using traditional methods, it would have cost billions. If Bittorrent could overcome the stigma that has been attached to it, it could probably revolutiionize the internet as we know it. You know, more than it already has.

The Bittorrent company is aiming to move things along by making a private file service for you to quickly disseminate files. Unlike more traditional services like Yousendit, Dropbox or Megaupload, basing the service on the Bittorrent protocol will mean the company needs almost no infrastructure and only a few servers. What computing power they do need will be provded by Amazon S3.

This service isn’t a web app; rather, like dropbox, you have to download a client to your machine. When you share a file, it automatically creates a private torrent of the file and sends a link via email to the recipient. The file is saved to the internet, but it is transferred using the Bittorrent protocol. That means your computer will also help host the file that is being transfererred, letting the company cut its bandwidth costs. It may not be as smooth as using Dropbox, but it is effective. And you won’t run into any pesky file size caps, either.