A California company that is watching the peer-to-peer world for a number of entertainment companies says KaZaA isn't the king of the P2P world any longer, at least not for now, with rival eDonkey the most widely used P2P network program in September – though not by much.
BayTSP said that prospect was seen as very likely earlier in the year, according to chief executive Mark Ishikawa. "It was just a matter of time," he told reporters. "eDonkey is a much better protocol for large files."
Indications were that eDonkey averaged 2.54 million users a day for the month in question while Kazaa averaged 2.48 million users.
BayTSP wasn't the only one to spot a prospect of KaZaA losing even small ground. "At heart, most of these peer-to-peer users are lazy," P2P portal site Zeropaid president Chris Hedgecock said in June. "KaZaA was simply the easiest way to get things they were looking for. Now they're being frustrated. It's taking longer to get files, so they're looking elsewhere."
That, according to other analysts, is more strongly a reason for KaZaA's slippage than the music industry's litigation program against online file swapping singling KaZaA out in particular. Some say it actually compares to Napster after the granddaddy of peer-to-peer – long since bought and resurrected as a pay-to-play online music store—inspired a small explosion of alternatives when the music industry finally brought Napster to its legal knees.
But eDonkey has also stayed close to new technological trends where KaZaA has sometimes been seen as slow to pick up on them, KaZaA's core technology said to be several years old whereas eDonkey built theirs to meet new, faster large-file transfer needs that have been created by broadband, DVD burning, and more potent compression programs, said one published analysis.
