P2P File Sharing Browser Plugin LittleShoot - BitTorrent - Gnutella

P2P File Sharing Browser Plugin LittleShoot - BitTorrent - Gnutella


What Is LittleShoot? - The Big Idea

The African National Congress had a prominent early presence on the level playing field of the Internet as Apartheid fell in 1994.
South Africa, 1/1/1950

At LittleShoot, we believe the Internet is the most powerful tool for free speech the world has ever known. This struck me, Adam Fisk, the co-founder of LittleShoot, on the first Internet site I ever visited: the site for the African National Congress (ANC), the organization led by Nelson Mandela dedicated to the overthrowing of Apartheid. On the level playing field of the Internet, the ANC could speak just as loudly as anyone else, and the Internet helped them spread their message to the world. What an amazing new tool for democracy! I was in college at the time, and I had just set up an independent study to build my own radio transmitter to start broadcasting a "pirate" signal in Providence, RI. After seeing the World Wide Web, though, it was clear this Tim Berners-Lee guy, the inventor of the initial World Wide Web standards, had created a transmitter far more powerful. I scrapped the independent study and started taking every computer science class I could.

LittleShoot is the most powerful transmitter I can imagine. After working for four years as the lead engineer at LimeWire, I started LittleShoot to overcome all of LimeWire's shortcomings, from ease of use to legal issues to the underlying technology. The result is a standards-based peer-to-peer application that works directly from your browser with the most powerful searching, publishing, and downloading technology available today.

LittleShoot is far more than just a powerful transmitter. It's also a receiver, and it can find new signals. In many ways, it's like Google for files instead of web pages, but that doesn't cover the transmitting. With LittleShoot, publishing your content is clicks away, and you don't have to wait for it to upload anywhere.

Breaking this down further, LittleShoot is a tool for:

1. Publishing (transmitting)
2. Searching (finding new signals)
3. Downloading (receiving)

LittleShoot provides optimal solutions to all three problems using the best of peer-to-peer and centralized technologies. We give you complete control over publishing and distribution of Internet media, all using open protocols and open standards and released as open source software.

Let's start with searching. When you search with LittleShoot, you can find all the media files everyone else on the network is sharing, all right within your browser. Here's what search results look like:



If you want to become an active participant in the network, to disseminate your knowledge, you have to publish. It couldn't be easier. Just click the "Browse..." button and select your file, and it's published to the world. You don't need to upload it or anything -- your file is immediately available in search results because it's already on your computer. With LittleShoot, that's all we need.

Here's what your LittleShoot publish page looks like:





Finally, when you actually go to download, you simply click on links in the download window. Behind the scenes, LittleShoot efficiently downloads the file using our peer-to-peer platform, but to you it appears and acts like any other link from a "normal" web page.

Together, we hope these simple building blocks -- intentionally as simple as possible -- contribute to the "welfare of the public" Hugo Black referred to so many years ago.