Next Steps

Dave Winer over at Dave’s Wordpress Blog has written an editorial on the Next Steps for Bittorrent.

In the article he describes the recent milestones of the technology and outlines the future needs in regards to software client integration and usability.

In my opinion, Bittorrent has probably hit its peak.  Over 50% of all internet traffic is Bittorrent based.  The only thing that is holding back the further use of the technology is “ease of use”.

For the lay-man or basic computer user, obtaining the correct software, torrent files and working out which file has the best seeds and peers ratio is not really making the process easy for people to understand and use.  Bittorrent clients such as uTorrent do go a long way to make things easier for people to use the technology - but I envisage something alot easier.

If a user could sign into a website and select a torrent from a list to download and then have the website download the torrent file for them into a folder held on that website - then that would make life alot easier.  The user could sign off the site and still have the torrent downloading for them.  People could be forced to share the files back to a preset ratio and also, locally held completed copies of the torrents could be made available immediately to the user and then seeded back too.

If anyone has ever used the Easynews website to download from Newsgroup servers - then you will have the basic idea of what I mean.

This facility would make the interface to the Bittorrent network accessible, faster and less open to file leechers.  Of course this is just an idea of mine and the resources to run such a service would be huge but would bring benefit to basic users.