Bit Torrent is said to be the fastest growing of a new generation of P2P programs using fast transmission of portions of files from numerous user hard drives instead of one central source.
British P2P traffic monitor CacheLogic says BitTorrent is transferring more data than any other P2P network around the world, using the so-called "swarming distribution" technique to pull portions of desired files from as many as thousands of computers which use BitTorrent.
"This enormous collection effort," said Technology Review, "is invisible to the user – there’s no assembly required, you might say. The only difference the user would notice is that the file arrives a lot faster than on most file-sharing services, since it comes as a collection of short bursts instead of in one laborious transfer. It’s as if a thousand people put together a jigsaw puzzle, with each person knowing exactly where his or her piece went."
Lacking a central interface such as used by KaZaA or the original Napster, BitTorrent's creators and users alike praise the program's virtual elimination of the search interface middleman, if you want to call it that.
“Programming a good search interface was pretty tough,” Bram Cohen, who began creating BitTorrent in 2001, told Technology Review. “I decided to make it someone else’s problem.” That, he said, has resulted in a growing network of Web sites providing lists of available files that make it easy for a BitTorrent user to begin downloading.
BitTorrent's other interesting feature is that the minute you start downloading something it becomes available portion by portion to others on the network, rather than a user having to wait until the completed file is finished before it's open for sharing. That, Technology Review said, broadens the size of the network and ramps up the download speed.
Called "P2P with brains" by Slashdot.org, BitTorrent has another feature that might prove attractive even beyond the strictly peer-to-peer world: considerable support from the open-source community, including having received a little financial help from LinuxFund, an open source group that tries to help support open-source software ideas.
