Using torrents is too complicated

Put together on August 2, 2007 7:17 pm by Thomas
What do you think?

Even though the torrent technology is being used for downloading pirated software, music and video, it also has a lot of legal uses. And no matter how much the MPAA and the RIAA would like to see it forever disappear that’s probably not going to happen. The reason for that is that torrents satisfy a fundamental business need: Cheap and fast content delivery.

Despite the fact that there’s been widespread adoption of torrent technology, it’s still not close to becoming ubiquitous. I think the reason is that it’s difficult to use. Most of the programs used to open and download torrents are quite complicated. You install them and pray that the default options work, because if they don’t you’re screwed. In fact, in order to even get to the stage that you try to find a good torrent downloader, you must first familiarize yourself with a new concept: Let’s say there’s a file you want to download, an installer for a MMORPG (which are typically distributed through torrent files). You don’t just download it. You download another, smaller file. Then you have to use a program to open that file, and then the file gets downloaded to your computer. That’s a mouthful to say, and as far as traditional downloading is concerned, it’s completely different, and alien to most light users.

This is too much. Things ought to be simpler.

The user clicks on a link. Who cares what the link is? A file is downloaded to his computer. Who cares how it’s downloaded? It just happens.

In the background, the torrent file is downloaded, and opened, and the installer is then downloaded to the user’s computer. The user only needs to know how long it will take, how much has been downloaded, and whether it will ever download (given that there might not be enough seeders).

There’s an idea, huh?

(Take a look at http://www.bitlet.org/. Not quite there yet, but on the right track.)

tags: idea

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