AOL Thus Far Neutral On "Gnutella Browser" Aimster

Posts: 266
From: Columbia, MD, USA
Registered: Feb 2000

posted 08-14-2000 12:09 PM     Click Here to See the Profile for ben_fenlon        Edit/Delete Message

AOL Thus Far Neutral On "Gnutella Browser" Aimster

By Kevin Featherly

Aimster, a Napster-like program that piggybacks on America Online's Instant Messaging protocol to facilitate Internet file-swapping, has attracted the attention of the world's largest Internet service provider. And AOL thus far is responding with thunderous neutrality.

"We are aware of the program," said Andrew Weinstein, an AOL spokesman. "And we are currently looking into it."

Weinstein wouldn't elaborate to say whether that meant AOL is, for instance, looking into Aimster with the idea of purchasing it, or of taking it to court. "We're looking into it, period," he said. "That's the quote we have right now."

Ironically, AOL last week shut down the MP3-searching feature on its WinAMP player, because it could not distinguish between legitimate downloads and illegal file-swaps of copyrighted songs.

Still, if litigation is on AOL's mind, Aimster is not worried. John Deep, an Aimster spokesman, said the 14-employee, Troy, N.Y., company feels completely insulated from lawsuits that have plagued others services like Napster and MyMP3.com. Those companies, which have allowed users to engage in either music file swapping or "file shifting," have come under legal fire after raising the hackles of the record and film industries.

That's not a problem for Aimster, insists Deep. "There's nobody to target here," he said. "You sure can't target us, because we're just a browser."

In fact, by some measures, Aimster could be the music industry's, the film industry's and the software manufacturing industry's worst nightmare come to life. Some critics, notably new media professor Steve Jones at the University of Illinois - Chicago, have contended that the temporary stay of injunction allowing Napster to go on operating for now is a blessing in disguise for harder-to-stop peer-to-peer services like Freenet and Gnutella, which do not rely on central servers as does Napster.

Jones said that those services are designed for the true-geek set--people who know how to turn their computers into servers by accessing Internet protocol addresses numerically, rather than through uniform resource locators (URLs) in Web browsers. That tricky skill has held the Gnutellas back from mass acceptance, he said.

Aimster's Deep frankly agrees with the assessment, acknowledging that Aimster has been in a rush for months to get its service out to the public before Napster is permanently put out of business. He describes Aimster as a "Gnutella browser" -- an interface for the masses that allows users to scour the contents of other people's hard drives directly, without the intervention of central, Napster-styled servers. In other words, it represents easy-to-use peer-to-peer communications, the thing that perhaps scares intellectual property owners the most.

"Aimster is a Gnutella browser, and there are maybe a couple of million Gnutella servers now all around the world," Deep said. "And these browsers understand how to render that stuff. This is totally for the mainstream. It's Gnutella for everybody; we've stripped the browser away from it and said, let's just make it really cool to look at, first of all; total eye candy. And then make it really easy to use and very fast in the way it responds -- just like Netscape did. We're just kind of following the old Netscape model."

Such a service could be impossible to stop, an idea Aimster implictly acknowledges on its Web site. "Don't put Lars on your buddy list," the site says, a wry reference to the struggle of Napster-fighting heavy metal band Metallica and the band's drummer and mouthpiece, Lars Ulrich.

The service piggybacks on AOL's Instant Messenger by interpreting that service's communications protocol, and co-opting it. When Aimster is downloaded, it checks the host computer to detect if the presence of AIM software. If it is there, the program automatically integrates and attaches the program's functionality, making itself available to any other machines that are included on the host user's AOL-IM buddy list.

If the computer has Gnutella on board, Deep said, it can be configured to scoop files out of all the computers on the Gnutella network, retrieving everything from photo images to music files to entire software programs - all for free.

"God knows, it is everything," Deep said. "It is music, but it's movies - it's independent moviemakers who want to get the movies out there to their public. It's everything."

Deep said that the company hopes to make Aimster an open-source platform capable of making other messaging programs such as ICQ available to Aimster users.

The program is free for download now, and will remain so, Deep said. The money will come later, he suggests.

"We think there is a real value in it," he said. "The network is going to become valuable to all these major interests that have consumer affinity networks of their own. They require bringing new people into the network and, more importantly, the need to retain the people that they have. This should be the most effective tool to meet both of those goals. You should be able to drive people into networks at a much lower cost and keep people loyal to the network for much lower costs."

So confident is Deep of Aimster's business model, that he expects some day Aimster users will themselves be paid, just for using the service.

Though not a supporter of copyright-infriging programs like Napster, analyst Jim Penhune, the director of media and entertainment strategies at the Yankee Group, said the Aimster concept is intriguing. And he agrees it may represent a serious threat to the music industry, among others.

"They can stop one particular company (like Napster) in this space," Penhune said. "But ... the alternatives that are not relying on one central server or clearinghouse are going be that much harder to pinpoint and target."

The analyst agreed with the Jones thesis that other companies are scurrying to make Gnutella-like peer-to-peer operations usable to the masses.

"I think these guys are all operating on this hurry-up timeframe right now, in the short window they have before the stay is, I think, eventually re-imposed on Napster," Penhune said. "I think the music industry doesn't expect that it is going to be able to eliminate the practice of illegally duplicating or file-sharing copyrighted material on the Internet. What they're most concerned about with Napster is that they don't want people founding publicly held businesses on that premise."

However, Penhune also suggested that as more companies pop up, each carrying with it the ability to link users to all the free stuff the Internet has to offer, their sheer numbers will overwhelm the public. There will be no standout success like Napster once Napster is gone, he said, the illegal file-sharing will once again be pushed back to the margins of popular Internet use.

"It will be interesting to see how those business models play out," Penhune said.

Since Aimster was first announced last Tuesday, Deep said, there have been more than 10,000 downloads of the software to personal computers scattered around the Internet.

Aimster is on the Web at http://www.aimster.com/

Reported by Newsbytes.com, http://www.newsbytes.com

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Posts: 989
From: Bowling Green, KY, USA
Registered: Mar 2000

posted 08-14-2000 01:48 PM     Click Here to See the Profile for KennyLee        Edit/Delete Message

Time for the next wave. User friendly Gnutella.

Lots of plans in development. This Aimster sure does seem like the deadliest of the bunch. If? They can piggyback on the 61 million AIM users? Whoa!!

But AOL may have something to say about that. I don't know.

Doesn't really matter though. User friendly Gnutella is coming this fall. In lots of flavors and sizes.

The cool thing is you can own all of 'em.

CHICKEN LITTLE

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