The Bad Blue P2P program is a free Gnutella file sharing utility which has one great feature, it can provide live Word document sharing across the Web via a browser. This means that you can set it up to share any Word documents on your hard disk with anyone even if they don’t have Word installed, and access can be controlled by passwords, folders and even by IP address.

Although it won’t cope with complex Word formatting, most standard Word docs are displayed properly, even those with images. You can also set it so that it just displays the documents, whilst preventing anyone from downloading them.

The prog uses Gnutella for its global P2P work, but you can shut that off and use it purely as a private Web server if you want. Those with dynamic IP addresses (like most of the cable modem and ADSL users in the UK) can sign up for something like DNS2Go and set up a permanent pointer. Bad Blue also works with URLBlaze, which is billed as the world’s first URL sharing P2P network.

This is a great application to show just how useful P2P is going to become once it moves out of the sensationalist, media driven ‘pirate’, classification. [via Chris Pirillo]