AllPeers, a personal P2P file-sharing startup based in Oxford, England, is down for the count. The company founders announced on AllPeers’ blog about the startup’s plans to shut down.
The personal P2P file-sharing space is a crowded one; not many companies can claim success. AllPeers tried to get traction by going open source back in March 2007, but that failed to boost their growth.
Co-founder Matthew Gertner emailed Liz Gannes with this response to her query:
Basically our investors had certain expectations in terms of user base growth. We were very happy with the adoption of the product but they weren’t. When we ran out of cash they weren’t willing to provide additional funding, so we have no choice but to shut the service down.
The source code for our client is already open source, and we’re planning to put it up on an independent site like SourceForge or Google Code in case it can be of use to others. We’re still deciding what to do with the server code, but there’s a good chance that we’ll decide to open source that as well.
AllPeers was backed by Index Ventures. I expect to see a brutal shakeout in this particular sector of the file-sharing business. The good news (if you can call it that) is that the AllPeers blog, “Peer Pressure,” is going to stay in business. I have enjoyed Matthew and Cedric’s writings and am glad to hear that they will still be sharing their viewpoints on everything from the web to P2P to startup life.
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10:04 AM PT
[...] P2P Start-Up AllPeers Closing Down AllPeers, a personal P2P file-sharing startup based in Oxford, England, is down for the count. The personal P2P file-sharing space is a crowded one; not many companies can claim success. AllPeers tried to get traction by going open source back in March 2007, but that failed to boost their growth. GigaOM has the full story. [...]
12:25 PM PT
[...] In einer Email an Liz Gannes von newteevee erklärt Gertner von Allpeers die aktuelle Situation folgendermassen: [...]
4:55 PM PT
[...] przeglądarki Firefox — Allpeers —, o którym wspominaliśmy wielokrotnie, zostali zmuszeni[1][2] do zamknięcia swojego [...]
1:11 AM PT
Five file sharing alternatives to Allpeers
So where can Allpeers users go next? Here are five suggestions, based on different usage scenarios …
9:54 AM PT
[...] that it is going to closed down, and my colleagues over at Gigaom are news that the start-up meet didn’t exhibit sufficiency growth to be healthy to bonded added ammo of [...]
12:34 PM PT
[...] may heave heard by now that the P2P startup AllPeers shut down yesterday, which cofounders Matthew Gertner and Cedric Maloux announced in this empassioned blog [...]
4 comments so far
11:03 AM PT
Om,
With all due respects to AllPeers.com, I have never understood how file sharing services like these can make money given copyright infringement being the core of their service offerings. This being the case, how is venture investment even justified? Perhaps you can share your thoughts given the number of startups in this space that you’ve likely encountered as a publisher. I’m keenly interested in what you think investors see as the opportunity long term.
Thanks in advance,
Curtis
4:56 PM PT
Define copyright infringement first. If a TV program is shown in England that will never be distributed to the U.S., is getting a copy of it from someone in England an infringement? Show me the economic loss! You can’t — because they’re not trying to gain money from me by selling it to me (or even “giving” it to me by an ad-sponsored TV broadcast). Foreign TV show “dark distribution” is the biggest component of file sharing as survey after survey has shown.
I will miss AllPeers. It was the first time I was easily able to 1) chat with people (I don’t otherwise do IM, and the hell with Twitter!), 2) swap files with friends, and 3) tap into torrents.
It was wonderful that it worked in Firefox. And it worked well too!
(link)
7:56 AM PT
“So where can Allpeers users go next?” Although we are deeply disappointed with the way this adventure has ended, my friend and i will go on gigatribe
where there is a will …
2:16 PM PT
Wow this really sucks! I used AllPeers all the time. I didn’t want to turn back to Gigatribe so I found another software called 2Peer. Haven’t really heard of them but their application rules. You can try it out at (link)
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