File sharing veteran Limewire released a new version of its gnutella/bit torrent client Wednesday that lets users share files with their Facebook friends, download files faster via bit torrent, and seed files back into the bit torrent network.
Version 5.2 also revamps the program's private sharing feature, launched in December. Rather than sharing each file with specific people, you can now create a list of files to share with all of your personal contacts, making it easier to share vacation photos, videos and so on while keeping any potentially racier content private.
Rather than creating its own social network, Limewire put its hooks into the networks people already use, which is a wise strategy. Between twitter, blogs, email, Facebook, instant messaging, text messaging, and something called a telephone, we hardly need another way to keep tabs on our friends.
Those who prefer to organize media on their own computers, rather than trusting it to Flickr, Vimeo and so on, will likely appreciate the way Limewire lets them serve media directly to their friends, even if the "hey, I just shared something with you" alert comes through another service (i.e. Facebook).
The main drawback to Limewire's private sharing feature is that both users need to be running Limewire at the same time in order to share. If Limewire's creators intend for us to keep the app running at all times, they might want to think about creating separate preferences for "maximum upload speed for friends" and "maximum upload stream for strangers," to avoid running up against ISP file bandwidth limits. Limewire product manager Nathan Lovejoy told us via phone that he'll consider adding that suggestion to a future version.
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