RedSwoosh. free your links

Ever since we posted the letter Johnny Cakes wrote to Steve Jobs, we've gotten some great perspectives coming from around the blogosphere.

One well-thought post written by Mike from Buzzword Compliant discusses some of our major challenges.

Some of them really hit home with us - we need to step our game up! But at the same time, we want to clear up some misperceptions about how the swoosh service works.

For instance,

"Hurdles to content drive away users. As anyone who has designed online systems knows, every single additional page load you force users to through will drive some of them away. Why do you think Amazon decided to patent the “1-Click checkout” and not the “12-Step Checkout”

We're working on improving our usability right now for both downloaders and distributors. But truth be told, swooshing is the easiest media delivery system we've ever used, and we don't just say that because we made it.

Don't believe us? Check out this tutorial from the Learn More section of our site.

Swooshing is really that easy, and it's getting even easier as we're beginning to integrate directly into popular file-hosting services. Our goal is to be as transparent as possible. We want to keep the focus on the content while increasing download speeds and lowering bandwidth costs.

If you're an end-user and bandwidth costs aren't a concern to you, remember that with up to 99% percent less bandwidth costs, your download servers won't have to overwhelm you with pop-up ads, donation requests, and other ways of paying the (avoidable) bills.

"Metcalfe’s law: networks increase in value proportional to the number of users in the network. I’ve never come across a link that’s asked me to load up RedSwoosh. "

Redswoosh starts really heating up with as few as ten users. It's easy to compare RS to all other P2P apps, but its our sheer efficiency, even in small numbers, which makes us distinct.

"It doesn’t work on the Mac. I’m hoping that they’re doing browser sniffing of some sort and redirecting links from Mac users so they aren’t totally out of luck."

Coming soon! Really really.

"RedSwoosh is positioning themselves against Akamai, which is most likely about the most expensive hosting on the planet, but I think they’re missing the true game changer in the field which is Amazon’s S3. While S3 is mostly referred to as a way to backup your files, it’s actually a massive file hosting operation as well. It’s debut has forced up the amount of bandwidth associated with many other web hosting services; blunting RedSwoosh’s value proposition. Nevermind the fact you can take advantage of Amazon’s huge uptime and bandwidth to directly distribute files for 15 cents a Gigabyte."

We're with you on that one. We're glad that Amazon is opening up S3 to developers, just like we do. We're hoping for some innotative crossovers that combine the best of our P2P with massive utility computing offered by S3.

And keep in mind that S3 is hyped for its disruptive capability in storage - that's not our bag baby. Amazon's bandwidth still costs twenty-cents a gigabyte, and for popular bandwidth-intensive services that use S3, the cost will make a difference.

With even a few users, Redswoosh brings down bandwidth costs to nothing - "free bucks and thrifty-free cents", as Johnny Cakes likes to say.
Mike also suggests that we "license RS technology to power individual applications. For example, WoW distributes their massive patches and updates via P2P."

That's a great idea, Mike. We'll be keeping an eye on your blog in case you have any others.

Until then, it's time to start rolling out more changes. If you have any suggestions for how we can improve our service, drop them in the comments.

We'll be watching, and featuring good suggestions regularly on the blog.

-James