Evolution of the Bittorrent to mainstream market

Evolution of the Bittorrent to mainstream market

The Bittorrent technology has seen massive ups and downs. It was designed to remove the limitations of the first generation of peer-to-peer applications, which normally required a central server where every user connected and searched for files available for download. Bittorrent removed that limitation by introducing the concept of torrent files, which just needed a tracker hosted on a website. The latest version of the technology removes even that limitation with Tracker-less Bittorrent available online.

The technology was developed to let companies lessen the load on their servers for making their applications available for download. Instead of every user downloading the files from a single or a cluster of servers hosted by the company, the file can be shared online on a massive scale by using the Bittorrent technology. This enabled the users to share the parts of the file already downloaded on their machines with other users resulting in faster and more optimized downloading procedure.

However, like most other technologies… Bittorrent got famous for all the wrong reasons. It became a hub for digital piracy with sites letting users share copyrighted content. It got so big that MPAA and RIAA had to intervene resulting in a large number of torrent search engines and tracker hosting websites to shut down. People in fact started associating BT technology with piracy on the Internet.

However, times are changing and the mainstream companies are recognizing the technology. Microsoft recently unveiled their own version of the Bittorrent technology codenamed Avalanche though it was somewhat criticized by the open source community for its protected features. Many organizations like Mozilla Foundation are using the torrents to provide their software applications on the web and the latest news is even more interesting.

The third most popular browser (arguably) on the web Opera has just got a technical preview update with the capability of downloading torrent files from within the browser. The company claims that the integration of the BT technology makes a lot of sense considering it just enhances the capabilities of its inbuilt download manager. In fact, they give the reference to the problems they faced during the launch of the Opera 8 final with the huge traffic on their servers due to large number of downloads in a limited period. The company says if they were using the Bittorrent technology for that launch, it would have been much easier for the company to sustain the traffic.

Now, the Open Source Community is in process of developing an extension for the Mozilla Firefox browser to add this similar functionality in the popular Firefox browser. That would further enhance the scope of usability of the BT technology considering users will not have to download a separate application to download files from the Internet using torrents. All these events have led to a stage where BT has become a recognized technology for file sharing on the Internet. And like most other technologies, there would always be some elements in the society who would be continuing to use it for illegal purposes.