Private Torrent sharing with Podmailing
08/04 2007 | 12:09 AM
Posted by: Janko Roettgers
There are tons of services out there that facilitate private file sharing. Most of them are based on Bittorrent. Some even offer the capability to download Torrents with the same program. Aside from that it's Balkanization though: Each service uses its own extension of the Bittorrent protocol, which means that Pando users can't talk to Allpeers users and vice versa.
Paris-based Zslide wants to bridge this gap now by making its Podmailing service compatible in both ways: You can use the Podmailing client to transfer plain vanilla Torrents, but you can also initiate private file transfers with users of Azureus, µTorent or any other Bittorrent client. And the best thing: Podmailing makes use of Amazon's S3 to cache files, meaning that you don't even have to be online for the file transfer to finish.
Podmailing apparently offered Bittorrent compatibility for a while now, but the whole thing didn't really work for me when I tried it previously. The company has just released a new, completely revamped version of the client - and it works like a charm.
I used Podmailing to "send" a file to an email address. The client almost immediately started to upload the file to S3, and the recipient got an email with a link to a customized Podmailing website that offered the choice between a regular Torrent file and a .zed file - that's Podmailing's extended Torrent format, offering some additional metadata and, in case of a movie file, a screenshot. I used Azureus to download the file - and again, it worked flawlessly.
Another interesting aspect of Podmailing is that the service isn't nosy at all. You don't need to sign up for an account - just provide your e-mail address, and you're ready to go. And finally, files can easily be forwarded to multiple recipients after being uploaded just one single time.
I must say I'm really impressed with Podmailing. It doesn't have many hugely innovative features that would set it apart from it's competitors - but it does a great job with the basics, and the possibility to privately share large files with any Bittorent user definitely makes it a keeper. After all, which other program that you've never heard of offers you instant access to a base of tens of millions of users?
Paris-based Zslide wants to bridge this gap now by making its Podmailing service compatible in both ways: You can use the Podmailing client to transfer plain vanilla Torrents, but you can also initiate private file transfers with users of Azureus, µTorent or any other Bittorrent client. And the best thing: Podmailing makes use of Amazon's S3 to cache files, meaning that you don't even have to be online for the file transfer to finish.
Podmailing apparently offered Bittorrent compatibility for a while now, but the whole thing didn't really work for me when I tried it previously. The company has just released a new, completely revamped version of the client - and it works like a charm.
I used Podmailing to "send" a file to an email address. The client almost immediately started to upload the file to S3, and the recipient got an email with a link to a customized Podmailing website that offered the choice between a regular Torrent file and a .zed file - that's Podmailing's extended Torrent format, offering some additional metadata and, in case of a movie file, a screenshot. I used Azureus to download the file - and again, it worked flawlessly.
Another interesting aspect of Podmailing is that the service isn't nosy at all. You don't need to sign up for an account - just provide your e-mail address, and you're ready to go. And finally, files can easily be forwarded to multiple recipients after being uploaded just one single time.
I must say I'm really impressed with Podmailing. It doesn't have many hugely innovative features that would set it apart from it's competitors - but it does a great job with the basics, and the possibility to privately share large files with any Bittorent user definitely makes it a keeper. After all, which other program that you've never heard of offers you instant access to a base of tens of millions of users?
vargas wrote: