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'Torrent Tweets' Marries BitTorrent to Twitter

Peer-to-peer file sharing is getting its hooks into Twitter, thanks to an update from BitTorrent, the company that makes the popular µTorrent client and which is seeking to make a big, legitimate business from a protocol most associated with copyright infringement. Despite its name, peer-to-peer file sharing is often a solitary pursuit, where users’ computers […]
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The latest version of the BitTorrent file sharing software allows users to discuss what they're downloading using automatically created Twitter hashtags that correspond to each shared file.

Peer-to-peer file sharing is getting its hooks into Twitter, thanks to an update from BitTorrent, the company that makes the popular µTorrent client and which is seeking to make a big, legitimate business from a protocol most associated with copyright infringement.

Despite its name, peer-to-peer file sharing is often a solitary pursuit, where users' computers swap bits of files, while the users themselves remain anonymous to one another. BitTorrent is hoping to make this more social by using Twitter to make it easy for people downloading and uploading the same file to talk about it.

A new feature in the beta version of the µTorrent client called Torrent Tweets allows users to talk about a given download from within the application and see what everyone else is saying on Twitter, as demonstrated by the perfectly non-infringing screenshot above (the Yes Men encourage this version of their documentary to be distributed in this fashion).

This system works by creating a unique Twitter hashtag using bit torrent's own infohash, a unique identifier that fingerprints every file shared via BitTorrent.

The idea is to turn the often lonely world of the BitTorrent downloader into a global party where viewers and downloads can mingle to chat about the audio, video, software and text files available free of charge thanks to trackers hosted around the world.

That's a fine feature for those downloading works whose copyright owners, like the Yes Men, don't mind people sharing their files – or, say, a document from Wikileaks. But given that most people's Twitter feeds are public and archived for posterity by the Library of Congress, sharing with the world that you are downloading a copy of Hurt Locker could be an easy way to make yourself a target for an expensive copyright infringement lawsuit.

BitTorrent announced this app on Thursday, and so far, it's only available within the latest beta version of µTorrent (BitTorrent owns µTorrent). Company spokesman Simon Morris told Wired.com that this latest version won't leave beta status and become the default version for a while.

"Historically it takes a few months, incorporating some feedback cycles with our community and a ton of bug fixes," said Morris. "Conservatively, I’d say some time in the fall of this year."

Of course, BitTorrent's µTorrent is just one of the many BitTorrent clients out there, including the popular Vuze (formerly Azureus). Torrent Tweets won't truly become a standard for BitTorrent users until the rest of the clients incorporate it as well, which would be relatively straightforward to do, because it's mostly just a matter of writing simple code to turn BitTorrent infohashes into Twitter hashtags.

In his announcement of the new Torrent Tweets app, Morris encouraged the developers of other BitTorrent clients to integrate this functionality into their software as well. If they do, the marriage between Twitter and BitTorrent will be complete, for better or for worse.

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