Today marked the death of two great startups: AllPeers and Ezmo. AllPeers is the Firefox extension that originally emerged as a way to share files between your friends and family, and later on they started to support BitTorrent transfers. Having this integrated into your browser is pretty convenient, but it didn’t take off quite like they hoped that it would. They didn’t get the user growth that they were shooting for, and that’s understandable. The extension didn’t last long on my system because it was difficult to find other people willing to install it, which is required if you want to share files with them.
Here’s a snippet from what the AllPeers blog had to say about shutting down the service:
It is with deep regret that we inform our users, friends and fans that we will be shutting down the AllPeers service today. We are tremendously proud of the product that our team has built, and we remain convinced of the potential of adding social features like file sharing to the web browser. However, we have not achieved the kind of growth in our user base that our investors were expecting, and as a result we are not able to continue operating the service.
Ezmo actually sounds like a pretty nifty music sharing service, but I hadn’t heard about it until today. They would let you upload your music to their servers so that you could listen to it no matter where you were at. The software worked with iTunes, Winamp, and Windows Media Player for uploading your tunes, which you could then share with your friends.
They ran into problems when trying to work with the music labels who weren’t very cooperative:
It has always been clear to us that Ezmo had to be a free service for all users. Our revenue model is based on music sales (and promotion), for which one needs at least some sort of cooperation with music labels. We have had repeated meetings and contact with the major labels, but their willingness to cooperate in finding innovative solutions for music sales seems non-existent. Their terms were not compatible with the conditions a small start-up operates under. We still feel absolutely confident that services like Ezmo will have a major significance in the future, but the lack of cooperation and even threats of lawsuits from the labels and their organisations has made intermediate financing paramount in order to secure a necessary time horizon for the company. Without that financing in place, Ezmo has no alternative but to shut the service down and close the company.
So here we are burying two great startups today. The AllPeers site has already been taken down, but the extension is still available on the Firefox add-ons site. Ezmo will continue running until March 14th.
Thanks to Emil for the tip on Ezmo!
I’m sad to see AllPeers go, it was definitely one of my favorite Firefox addons, and was very well developed.
I used it all the time with friends of mine to transfer large files between each other, without having to use a middle man service (upload to a website then have them download from the website).
But I can see why they didn’t achieve their user base they needed, as it is a Firefox addon, which necessitates that users must use Firefox, then they must make an account, and get your friends to do the same so that you could use it between each other…and then have each friend add the other to their buddy list in order to start transferring files. That and the fact that most users don’t transfer large enough files to need a service like this in order to send friends files, email is often a much simpler and established substitute.
In my experience it took some time to get my friends to use this in place of email attachments, or IM file transfers took a little effort, but once they started using it, they continued using it in place of the other options. Once you get over the hurdles of installation, etc….the simplicity of use and speed of transfers easily made it a worthwhile service.
I was really interested in AllPeers when it first launched and used it to share digital photos and videos with my mother and send her interesting links. It was really easy once I got it installed for her and it was nice to just drag and drop links without opening a separate program. Then they released a newer version which was incompatible with some of my other extensions and otherwise unstable so I had to uninstall.
Some time ago I reinstalled AllPeers and it seemed really great but it was just simply easier to email stuff or send by IM than to set AllPeers working on all computers, recover old accounts and get people to use it again.
I think the development was way too slow and there wasn’t much marketing beyond the initial launch. I had hoped that they were busy working on a Firefox 3 compatible version and would speed up development soon.
I’d still like to have an easy to use desktop program to share files with family and friends, my new digital camera records very high quality videos which I can’t send by email anymore. I tried Tubesnow, which is now also closed, but it was way too heavy to use on older computers. Any recommendations?
You might want to try MP3tunes at [mp3tunes.com] as an alternative to Ezmo. It’s free, by the way.
Mris mentioned using instant messengers to transfer files, and that is exactly what I do. All of my friends and myself use Google Talk to share files between each other, and it works great.
We’ve actually done a pretty extensive write-up about that service before: [cybernetnews.com]
I know, CyberNet is where I get all the good stuff.
I just thought it was strange that you didn’t mention it as an alternative to Ezmo in the article.