French-based GigaTribe is a piece of software which allows you to set-up your owns peer-to-peer file sharing network for you to share files amongst friends. The idea of a private peer-to-peer network is nothing new; a list of private P2P networks can be found on the Wikipedia.
The most hyped private P2P network recently must be AllPeers. Personally, I dislike this as it relies on your web browser.
GigaTribe is independent of your web browser but requires you to use Windows 2000 or above. However, they claim a Linux and OS X version will be finished by summer which is a good move to make as I believe these will end up being more popular than Vista (which it does support).
Sadly, the site and software is lacking greatly in the aesthetics department! The page’s choice of colours are bloated and not very Web 2.0 at all; they colours are about as tasteful as an early 2000s web host’s homepage’s choice! The software employs a similar choice of colours to the site which is unfortunately also a mixture of blues and reds.
The free version of GigaTribe only allows you to download 1 file from 1 host at a time which I expect will grow annoying. However, for £15 you can buy a lifetime unlimited licence removes these restrictions and adds multihost downloads.
I do wonder if GigaTribe will survive against the likes of AllPeers and Microsoft Office’s Groove.
Thanks for the feedback, we take into consideration all of the suggestions we get and will factor them into the next major revision of the software! As for All Peers, it only works for Firefox users, and Groove is more of a folder synchronisation type deal. GigaTribe allows you to share specific folders on your harddrive within a private, secure network of friends; it has many features that the others don’t, an example being that you can view pictures as thumbnails before you download them to your computer.
I agreed on the aesthetics too but John said they are working on that. That’s the biggest downside to me, but in theory, it could be really cool.