Bittorrent Advancements

Puttin’ People On The Moon by Drive-By Truckers
[audio:http://www.archive.org/download/dbt2008-01-12.km184.flac16/dbt2008-01-12d1t01_64kb.mp3]

I started using AllPeers again recently, and since I had last used it, they added Bittorrent functionality. But even more interesting, is that they let you download individual files from a torrent. Because of UConn’s bittorrent cockblock, I haven’t even opened a torrent client on this computer yet, so I don’t know if this is a wide-spread feature or not.

Whatever the case, a website called BitLet (which I guess has some connection to Mininova) has launched, and it allows you to stream music from within a torrent. Yes, its cool, but apparently, there is video on the way. That is far cooler. So I started snooping around to see if I could find out any more about this technology, and apparently there is something called Bittorrent DNA put out by Bittorrent Inc. which does something similar. As I understand it, its a backend that you could integrate into a site like YouTube, and have users supply some of the bandwidth via bittorrent protocol.

So all of this new functionality got me thinking about my idea for a browser based off bittorrent protocol, where webpages and other things would be served up from the people viewing the site, instead of a central server. I don’t have anywhere near the technical knowledge that I would need to pursue this project, but I’m going to keep designing it to see if it could be feasible. Right now I’m thinking it would be best to have it as a Firefox extension, so it would be easily adopted by users. I’ll post more about this when I figure it out.