Lime Wire Goes Social (Networking)

Limewire, perhaps the most popular p2p client and one of the major untraditional music distributors still has to deal with lawsuits filed by certain multiple record companies. Since the big deals have been closed with many content networks such as MySpace, YouTube and other, Lime Wire doesn’t want to miss out a great opportunity here (while it can) and plans to magically turn into a licensed P2P service gaining that precious legitimacy. It has already made a step in this direction with a new personalization feature through which users can share files only with specific friends.

This is what Lime Wire chief operating officer Kevin Bradshaw told Wired.com:
"Lime Wire was started, unbelievably, about eight years ago now and the world has changed so much since then. Let's try to remind everybody about what the roots of P2P actually are, and why ordinary folks really believe that this will be something of value to them. It's not all about lawsuits and horrible stuff, there's also some great technology going on here as well."

As Bradshaw states, first thing on the agenda would be the integration of social networking features to the Lime Wire client followed, eventually by Web- and mobile-based social networking features.

"Peer-to-peer activity has always been social, it's just been anonymous and social," said Bradshaw. The new features will let Lime Wire users "personalize what [they] might wish to share with who and how [they] might wish to be informed about the sharing activities of known and trusted colleagues and friends."

It seems that the current features will be kept and using any of the new personalization features will not be imposed to users.
"This is what peer-to-peer was meant to be, and that was just a great, simple, uncomplicated, enjoyable way to share things that you care about with people that you care about," added Bradshaw. "I have a 65-year-old mother in Scotland, and the idea of asking her to sign up with SnapFish and to log in, and the upload process, it's still a very complicated thing for ordinary people. Imagine a situation where she would have an installation of Lime Wire… I could just drop pictures into a folder on my hard drive and they would automatically appear on her drive."

Limewire CEO George Searle made an official statement regarding the lawsuits the company are facing highlighting the wrong approach the record labels have toward them and other such music distributors:

"The endless stream of lawsuits filed by the major record labels hasn't done anything to help the music consumer, nor has it put a single penny into the pockets of artists, songwriters and publishers," stated Searle. "Litigation isn't a good digital business model. We're confident in our position and in the eventual outcome of this lawsuit, and we look forward to the day we can work together with the entire music industry to help expand its reach and deliver more to the consumer."

Lime Wire currently has "80 to 100 million reasonably regular users."