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uTorrent Opens Up Apps, Starts Developer Challenge

blog.bittorrent.com

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Re: uTorrent Opens Up Apps, Starts Developer Challenge

#11
post #4

Must everything become a platform?

Once you get down to it, all code is written on top of a platform. Why not use the wisdom of crowds and open it up to everyone so that they can contribute their ideas?

I see the argument, and no doubt it'll be pretty successful, but a large reason why I liked uTorrent is because it was fast and lean. More layers of abstraction tends to lead to slower performance.

I wonder if they're trying to compete with Azureus / Vuze with this?

:| It's the "why no love for the hardcore gamer?" lament all over again. People who care are a minority.

Re: uTorrent Opens Up Apps, Starts Developer Challenge

#13

What's an example of a useful thing you can write?

Probably a web server which stores data in a distributed (and fault tolerant) way in all these clients. There will be no central point of failure. This will be really worthy of being called "cloud" as opposed to a bunch of servers put together in a farm.

In addition to the advantage of being fault tolerant, a system like this will be able to balance the load in such a way that the website never goes down in case of a traffic surge.

Another benefit (or not, depending on how you see it) will be that a website hosted in a torrent cloud will be difficult to take down by anyone.

Re: uTorrent Opens Up Apps, Starts Developer Challenge

#15

What's an example of a useful thing you can write?

Some interesting ideas ....

- Make it easy for people to get TED talks via. BitTorrent with recommendations

- Share your torrents with friends in a Blippy style feed

- Make something feel good, like a map with the general locations of all the peers you're connected to.

Re: uTorrent Opens Up Apps, Starts Developer Challenge

#16
post #9

"apps" are the new "extensions" which were the new "plugins" which replaced "skins" which supplanted "themes". Or something like that. How long before have to have this conversation: "Our product needs to support user customization. We need apps!" "We have an extension framework." "But that's not apps!" From http://www.utorrent.com/labs/griffin The Griffin project introduces a web-based extensions framework for µTorr…

µTorrent (many torrent clients infact) have long had their own web interfaces, for managing downloads thru a browser from afar.

It sounds like these Apps/Extensions are simply a tidier bundling of the long present webgui [webgui.zip ?]. Technically, I bet all this was possible already, but this likely makes the use more conventional, supported, & easier to setup.

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