One Swarm is a new free P2P file swapping program which goes one step beyond BitTorrent by offering what the developers call ‘fine grained control’ over privacy by allowing users to set who can share files. This kind of friend to friend file sharing (video) can be very useful in all sorts of ways (think sharing massive photo albums and the like) which makes it much more than just a generic music swapping tool. The freeware is also backwards compatible with BitTorrent, and so can function like a standard P2P product if necessary.

I like the fact that the interface is completely browser based, which makes it super simple to understand. In fact the UI is not a million miles away from Gmail (maybe it’s just the colours), and the layout is clear and self-explanatory. It took me a few goes to get a test file downloaded using BitTorrent, (the integration with search links and the program appears to be a little suspect) but once it got going it worked well.

The software has been developed by some folks at the University of Washington and they’ve clearly put some thought into it. The addition of an integrated media player, for instance, is not a new idea, but it’s very useful, so it’s nice to see it included. A nice product with some cool features, now if only I had some friends to share my holiday snaps with.

 OneSwarm is a new P2P data sharing application we’re building to provide users with explicit control over their privacy by enabling fine-grained control over how data is shared. Instead of sharing data indiscriminately, data shared with OneSwarm can be made public, it can be shared with friends, shared with some friends but not others, and so forth. We call this friend-to-friend (F2F) data sharing.