genieyclo

There’s a new file sharing service that essentially functions something like a socially-interactive p2p program called Wuala. It’s a startup developed by Dominik Grolimund and a team of developers under the sponsorship of Caleido Inc.

It’s pretty interesting because it’s quite different from it’s competitors like Bittorent. It’s a Windows program that you can use to upload any type of file you want, and there’s a huge amount of space you can have (of course, huge is a relative term depending on how big a file your uploading). You get 1 G free when you start up, and get an additional 1 G for every friend you add.

One of the strangest things about it that sets apart from all the rest is that it encrypts all your files (128-bit AES) locally and saves them on others’ hardrives around the world who are also using Wuala. Of course, you can still see your own files any time you want, even if your offline. The thing about the encryption though is that since it’s all done locally…if you for some reason forget your password..you’re pretty much screwed..Unless you open a new account and reupload all of your private files.

That brings us to another feature of the file uploading of Wuala; you can set it’s level of “sociability”. Any file can either by deemed Public, Shared-with certain friends you explicitly choose, or Private as long as it doesn’t overide the settings set for the folder it’s in. Like if a file is in a folder you’ve designated as private, you can’t designate one of the pictures as public.

There’s groups you can join and create and friends that you can befriend, so there’s the social aspect to it. Like I said in a past post, I found out about Ubuntu Muslim Edition in a group created for it in Wuala.

TechCruch UK did a piece on how similiar Wuala seemed to Bittorrent, at least in concept. This is true to a point. The whole upload, and download huge files for mass consumption. After that, they’re nothing alike. Bittorrent has a way that a torrent is uploaded to it’s server and after that it’s broken up into something like pieces of puzzle as MujahideenRyder described. Wuala is doesn’t do this and furthermore, it has a much more interactive and dynamic interface than any Bittorrent client.

I personally think it’s pretty sound in all fields, with good aesthetics, clean code (I haven’t seen any glitches yet), it’s still in a invitational alpha right now (I got one a while back), but they’re going to unveil the official beta in 2 weeks on the 14th of August from their offices in Zurich, Switzerland.