In what seems a move to regather some of its sagging market share Limewire has released a new version 5 that has some new ways to obtain content legally and povide an advertising platform for limewire to make money from.
http://www.p2p-blog.com/item-917.htmlLimewire has taken a big, bold step forward with the release of version 5.0 alpha of its file sharing client today. The new version features a completely revamped UI, an integration of the Limewire store, support for private file sharing and chatting based on Jabber / XMPP and contextual text ads, among other things. It's a major milestone for Limewire, and it could help to stop the erosion of its user base as well as actually win over some new and former users.
One last thing to mention are probably the contextual ads. Limewire has been talking about big plans for its upcoming advertising network for a while now, and the company always made it clear that they want to separate themselves from P2P ad companies that inject "sponsored content" into search results. The new version of the client definitely shows where things are going: Ads are separate from search results, and pretty much look like the contextual advertising you see on a search engine like Google.
If this client is still pay-for-pro then how does this square with adding in contextual advertising ?
Whilst is has one or two items of interest it looks like limewire is heading the way of Imesh etc in merely becoming a medium to share files and suffer advertising all in one, I cant see anyone whooping with joy because limewire has its own version of an Mp3 store where folks can purchase the track they want, such facilities have been already available, in short I can only feel they have moved away from their core users and are merely maximising profits for themslves.
