Former Limewire developer here. I definitely had an iPod mini prior to Limewire's peak years, counted by number of monthly peers reachable via crawling the Gnutella network.
That’s very interesting to note. I imagine that the popularity of the iPod led a lot of new people to Limewire before the iTunes Store and Spotify took off, pushing its true peak to be a lot later than most (including myself) might recall.
The “Don’t steal music” label on every new iPod might as well have been a Limewire ad.
We had an internal URL for a graph of daily sales. Sales definitely went up every time the major record labels put out a press release that they were planning to sue because of the amount of music available.
> What's your take on how everything works these days?
Mostly, I wish technologies to make unreliable P2P transfers more robust had been widely applied to point-to-point transfers. I wish my phone, for instance, used low-data-rate UDP (with TCP-friendly flow control and a low priority IPv6 QoS) with a rateless forward error code (such as Network Codes) to download updates. There's no reason an update download should just fail and start over if WiFi is spotty or you move between WiFi networks.
Power, CO2, and cost efficiencies of scale due to centralization are nice. The shift to mobile makes P2P more challenging, see Skype switching to a more centralized architecture to make mobile conversations more stable.
I wish we had somehow come to a point where users were incentivized to use P2P programs that marked P2P traffic using the IPv6 QoS field to flag P2P traffic, rather than relying on heuristics to try and shape traffic. Using heuristics to shape traffic incentivizes P2P traffic to use stenography and mimic VoIP or video chat, making everything less efficient. Monthly data quotas at different QoSes, after which all the traffic gets a low priority, would incentivize users to use programs that explicitly directly signal traffic prioritization to the routers.
Comcast's traffic shaping attempts using heuristics seem to have caused it to forge RST packets when Lotus Notes (mostly used by enterprises) downloaded large attachments, breaking attachment downloads.[0]
> Do you miss p2p?
Sometimes.
> Do you think we could ever get back to it?
I think that really depends on corporate censorship (with and without government pressure) trends in the near future, and how hard the average person wants to push back. I think P2P is unlikely to see a major resurgence any time soon.
I think a better criterium for "peak years" is peak momentum (user increase over time), vs peak users.
Most technologies reach peak users when they stop growing or when their growth stops accelerating (and then they either get somewhat stable -e.g. Microsoft, or like many, start to decline - e.g. Blackberry).
Limewire's peak years were immediately before settling a lawsuit. When the lawsuit threats started, the owner panicked, put out a press release saying that he would shut down the company right away, then back-peddled and announced he'd fight the lawsuit. There was a ton of noise in the press and lots of media speculation about what was going to happen, which generated tons of free advertising.
Part of the settlement was using the auto-update feature to update the vast majority of users to a record-label-developed application that was skinned to look like LimeWire. (I left a year or two before the killing update, but as I remember, they made one release that removed the optionality from the auto-update, waited for the majority of users to update, and then force-updated everyone.)
LimeWire's fall in popularity didn't look anything like a normal decline.
I don't think the media frenzy free advertising was intentional, but the owner was a bit of a mad genius. He has tons of ideas, 80% of which are batshit crazy, and 1% of which are out-of-the-box brilliant. He has a few people close to him who are good at picking out the uncut diamonds. He also founded and runs a very successful hedge fund. On the other hand, he emailed everyone a paranoid email and then talked to journalists about it when it leaked[0].
The “Don’t steal music” label on every new iPod might as well have been a Limewire ad.