Finally, after months and months of hype and excitement, AllPeers launched. In Beta of course, lest it not be considered a Web 2.0 company.
Me and a friend installed the FireFox plugin, and fired it up. To start with, the buddy search mechanism is terrible. I actually typed my friend’s name, got a result, and added it to my roster – turns out it wasn’t even his profile. You cannot see details about the search results, which is a problem. With Skype, for example, sometimes you can turn up a dozen of hits on a buddy search, but at least you can get an idea of who is behind each result.
Once added a friend, it was time to share some files. I added a couple to my shared folder, and the files showed up there. My friend could not see them. I refreshed, and the files dissapeared. By the time I ended the test and decided to remove the plugin, I still hadn’t managed to get the files to stay put. My friend shared one file. It showed up twice on my screen (?!). The actual download of the file went well, but after that, the files also dissapeared from his screen.
There are a lot of bugs as it stands – at one stage, I had a buddy selected, but the screen showed “When ABC shares some files, you will see them here”, where ABC was my nickname. When I removed a buddy from my list, I could still see his shared files until I changed the folder view!
Frankly, platforms such as Pando work much better in terms of stability and ease of use. I am sure AllPeers will eventually iron out the issues, but right now, the service is a non-starter. This post also talks about the system being built upon a bug in FireFox, which when fixed will kill its ability to work as a P2P endpoint – any confirmation on this?