ReadWriteWeb and some others have recently posted about RedSwoosh after they made the boast that they could save Apple $15 million dollars and that their service was more efficient than BitTorrent. You’re supposed to “swoosh” your link by pre-pending them with a URL they give you (and that you can find on the front page of their site). Doing so means that people that click your link will be redirected through RedSwoosh’s server which will lookup other people who have previously downloaded that same file and you’ll simultaneously pull in parts of the file from lots of different people.
There are a number of flaws with their plan for world domination (besides having a generic sounding name, I mean come on, the open source hacker with aspergers came up with a better name)
1. Metcalfe’s law: networks increase in value proportional to the number of users in the network. I’ve never come across a link that’s asked me to load up RedSwoosh. To write this post, I did load up the client and still couldn’t find a link to click. BitTorrent currently accounts for half the traffic on the Internet with millions of users.
2. Hurdles to content drive away users. As anyone who has designed online systems knows, every single additional page load you force users to through will drive some of them away. Why do you think Amazon decided to patent the “1-Click checkout” and not the “12-Step Checkout” (besides trademark disputes with AA).
3. It doesn’t work on the Mac. I’m hoping that they’re doing browser sniffing of some sort and redirecting links from Mac users so they aren’t totally out of luck. Even so, it seems a bit audacious to speculate on how much money they could save using your software, if you know it actually ran on their platform. Certainly there is iTunes for Windows, but it just isn’t in the Mac spirit.
4. It’s proprietary. If I was sufficiently motivated (or clever) I could roll up my sleeves and write my own bit-torrent client for the Amiga tomorrow. This doesn’t mean I’m going to, but having the whole protocol open means that I don’t have to worrry about RedSwoosh going belly up, or turning “evil” tomorrow. The EULA you agree to today may not be the one that you implicitly are forced to follow tomorrow.
5. The dirty secret of most P2P applications is that they aren’t truly Person 2 Person, they still rely on lookups to a central database to tell your particular peer where the other ones are. In BitTorrent’s case, you can run your own and distribute all the files you want. However there is one central lookup point and no matter how much redundancy they have built into that system you can’t possibly hope to match the redundancy in thousands of machines run on different OS’s, on different networks around the world.
6. RedSwoosh is positioning themselves against Akamai, which is most likely about the most expensive hosting on the planet, but I think they’re missing the true game changer in the field which is Amazon’s S3. While S3 is mostly referred to as a way to backup your files, it’s actually a massive file hosting operation as well. It’s debut has forced up the amount of bandwidth associated with many other web hosting services; blunting RedSwoosh’s value proposition. Nevermind the fact you can take advantage of Amazon’s huge uptime and bandwidth to directly distribute files for 15 cents a Gigabyte.
The one area I can see they possibly be able to make some money in would be to license their P2P technology to power individual applications. For example, WoW distributes their massive patches and updates via P2P.
WHAT TO DO NOW?