Bearshare is one of the most popular P2P products and captures some of Napster’s community spirit. There is little option to define your search and its search engine is slow. The majority of attempted downloads failed. www.bearshare.com
LimeWire is the second most popular. The interface allows multiple simultaneous searches. Download options such as minimum speed are easy to control. Searching for video yielded poor returns, but music content was good. Successful downloads have improved, but are still not good enough. www.limewire.com
KaZaA boasts 2-million users and promises much, including an instant messaging facility and fast searches. Sadly, logging on took the best part of half an hour, and searches took almost that long. It is also prone to cookies and pop-up advertisements. Definitely one to avoid. www.kazaa.com
iMesh is gaining in popularity. The interface seems to work well enough for music and video, and offers an instant messenger facility. However, like KaZaA, files are marked with a vague rating system rather than telling you the speed of the host modem. Furthermore, iMesh is about to impose its own music filtering. Will it go the same way as Napster? www.imesh.com
Gnotella allows three simultaneous searches and file-sharing in all common media formats (MP3, MPEG, Avi, JPEG, Zip, txt). Downloads were fairly quick, and the selection of video files was encouraging. File duplication was still a problem, but it was nice to be able to restrict the number of uploads. Probably the best of the bunch, but not a patch on the original Napster. www.gnotella.com
Napster still staggers on, but in a grievously weakened state. Since a recent upgrade the service has been suspended while new filters are tested to keep the record industry happy. Searches still work, as does the instant messaging facility, but with the volume of traffic falling 90% since February, few would deny that Napster is effectively dead. www.napster.com Mike Anderiesz