File sharing coming to all Facebook Groups

[silicon_toad2000]

Facebook is planning to add file sharing to Facebook Groups. Users will be able to share files up to 25MB in size. To fight piracy, Facebook plans to rely on users reporting illegally shared content.

This reminds me of something else that came from Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg: Wirehog. That’s right, Zuckerberg worked on various other projects before he decided to build the world’s largest social network.

Wirehog was a friend-to-friend file sharing program that allowed people to transfer files directly between computers. Wirehog was created by Andrew McCollum, Mark Zuckerberg, Adam D’Angelo, and Sean Parker in Palo Alto. They described it as “an HTTP file transfer system using dynamic DNS and NAT traversal to make your personal computer addressable, routable and easily accessible.”

Launched in October 2004, Wirehog was only accessible via an invitation from a member. It was originally planned as an integrated feature of Facebook, but it could also be used by friends who weren’t registered on Facebook. Facebook and Wirehog were integrated so that Wirehog knew who your Facebook friends were in order to make sure that only people in your network could see your files. Wirehog was written in Python and was available for Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X, with a promised Linux version that was never released.

Until at least July 2005, Facebook officially endorsed the p2p client on its website. The project was killed in January 2006. At least one of its uses on Facebook, namely sharing photos, has been superseded by the introduction of photo sharing on the social network itself. Facebook now sees more than 300 million photos uploaded to the social network each day. Wirehog, Myspace, Friendster, Picasa, Orkut, and others have all suffered as Facebook has become more and more dominant.

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/facebook/file-sharing-coming-to-all-facebook-groups/12855