1.6 Million PCs Track Popular P2P Clients

Hodejo1 writes "'Big announcements' are often backed up by a dubiously small data set or not backed up at all. Big Champagne, PC Pitstop and Digital Music News joined forces to analyze 1,661,688 PCs to track 152 unique P2P clients quarterly from September 2006 to September 2007. The result is a definitive list of the most popular P2P software in use. Topping the list by a healthy margin is LimeWire. 'In September of 2007 LimeWire was found on 17.8% of all the PCs polled that month. With regards to market share — counting only those users with at least one P2P application on their systems — LimeWire held a 36.4% share, meaning one out of three P2P users has LimeWire on their system. These numbers are up slightly from September 2006 when LimeWire held a market share of 34.1%'. Meanwhile, uTorrent has made huge gains during this period soaring into second place and posing a genuine challenge to LimeWire."

Whatever Happened to Google?

[SeeSp0tRun]

For one, these p2p clients tend to be breeding grounds for bad things. Aside from the RIAA and everything going on with the music industry as it is, the clients themselves are (if i am not mistaken) data miners, resource whores, and virus huggers (not to be confused with tree huggers).

Google (for me anyway) has been far more useful:
-inurl:htm -inurl:html intitle:"index of" mp3 "Your Title Here"

There are many more search parameters you could use, but that does the trick.

Gnutella? really?

[Hatta]

I'm amazed anyone is still using the Gnutella network. Have there been any improvements to it recently? Last I used it, probably 5 years ago, it was awfully slow. Both in searching and downloading, even edonkey was faster. Plus, it didn't seem useful for much other than individual mp3s. Again, on edonkey you could still find rars of full albums.

Of course, private trackers that focus on a certain niche of content (full albums, classic games, textbooks, etc) with quality control and ratios to ensure seeding are far and away the best. There's not a P2P app anywhere that can compare with what Oink offered. But torrents seem really underrepresented on this list. Limewire is on 36% of PCs surveyed, but only 28% of PCs surveyed had any bittorrent client at all? What gives?

Re:Gnutella? really?

[Digi-John]

I still use gnutella because I can *generally* find a specific mp3 within a few minutes. That's what it's good for, an impulse downloading of a reasonably popular song.

Re:Sexist comment

[s0litaire]

Hey"!! I've always used a Manual Gearbox But since I'm in the UK that's not unusual :P

Sorted by Network

[mzs]

Sept-07:

40.5% Gnutella
28.5% Bittorent
04.6% Ares
04.0% eDonkey
01.5% FastTrack
00.9% Pando

Re:Sexist comment

[madm0nk]

Uh .. I have news for you. C and/or C++ are far from outdated. If you are using Firefox, which you should be then you are using a program written in C++ which still uses all the fundamentals of C (e.g. pointers, structs, etc). Any game engine worth mentioning is written in C++. As a matter of fact the majority of all software is written in C++.

Re:Maybe the story is an advertisement.

[freemywrld]

You are comparing apples and oranges. Limewire isn't a bittorrent client. Limewire can be the most widely used P2P client in use, and Azureus can still be the most widely used by those who are downloading torrents.

Re:LimeWire?

[Anonymous Coward]

Amen to that. You can find torrents of the latest movies/games and whatever (mostly the same stuff you find on newsgroups, so i tend not to bother with torrents much, except for specialized/private trackers). But try to find content in french (and perhaps italian, spanish, etc), old movies, apps that only a minority of ppl use, older games (like original xbox games, not many left on torrents) and weird stuff in general. emule is by far the best place to look for that kind of stuff. There's also ridiculous amounts of ebooks and what not. Music? None of that gnutella single-mp3 junk (life's too short to download individual songs, rename them, re-tag them, etc), you almost always have the entire artist's discography in 1 zip or rar within the first 5 hits, with lots of sources.

As for it being slow, it often fills my 7mbit pipe... You HAVE to use KAD though, the ed2k network is crap.

don't count on this data

[ILuvRamen]

I find it completely ridiculous that Shareaza isn't even on the list. It's completely inaccurate. This data can't be right! I thought it'd be #3 at least. It's the best one I've ever used and I know it's super popular. I mean I know a lot of really stupid people use Limewire but Bearshare and Kazaa beat Shareaza? That's simply incorrect.

Re:seconded

[robot_love]

Fourthed. It's like having a library full of all the world's media at your fingertips. Any book. Any song. Any movie. Anything, from anywhen. It's there. A couple of years ago I found old BBC episodes of "The Tripods". Totally camp. Aired in the '80's!!

I didn't download anything, and I never have, however. Because that's wrong and will destroy civilization as we know it.