Late this summer, Johnny Deep, a 43-year-old small-time e-publishing consultant from the outskirts of Albany, N.Y., launched the beta version of Aimster, a service that enabled America Online (dossier) Instant Messenger (AIM) users to search their buddies' hard drives for MP3 music files.
Put another way, this meant that when AIM user Melissa, to pick a name, sent an instant e-mail message to her best friend in the whole world, Ashley, about the sparkly wonders of the new Britney Spears single, Ashley could do more than IM her back in happy-faced agreement: She could reach through the Net and huff Melissa's copy of "Oops! I Did It Again" straight off her hard drive.
What Aimster has done is allow AIM users like Melissa and Ashley to set up their own "distributed index" file-swapping networks. The big tech difference between this approach and that of much-publicized Napster is that these smaller, more clandestine Internet jukeboxes are virtually untraceable by entertainment-industry enforcers, because the index of files resides only on the hard drives of the IM buddy-group members. "As far as I know," says Deep, at least a little disingenuously, "my users are sharing homework assignments."
Not likely. For AIM junkies, Deep's service quickly became the favorite new fix. Within two days of Aimster's Aug. 9 launch, 10,000 of a potential 65 million AIM subscribers had downloaded the program. Six weeks later, the number spiked to 1.5 million, according to Deep. Then Aimster released a second version that was compatible with the AOL (dossier)-owned IM service ICQ, adding 73 million more potential users to his service.
At his cluttered, 800-square-foot office in the incubator unit at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., Deep was paying the price for popularity. The deluge had overwhelmed Aimster's servers. While Deep typed an apology on www.aimster.com, his team of 15 young-dude programmers worked desperately to keep the site from browning out.
Thanks to his application's sudden renown, Deep has been logging 5,000 PCS minutes a month - enough to worry his wife about brain cancer. He has fielded calls from Intel (dossier), Yahoo (YHOO), AOL and Capitol Records, among others, each of which held out the prospect of a possible deal. "The great thing about Aimster," says Eric Scheirer, a Forrester Research (FORR) analyst who follows peer-to-peer file sharing, "is that it integrates a community, which is particularly important among music fans. Teenagers form whole social circles around their IM buddy lists. The idea that a bunch of friends can listen to music and chat about it at the same time is very compelling."
But the anti-piracy lookouts of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) have also spotted Deep's file-sharing shingle. They are prepared to take action against him to protect their members' intellectual property. Those courting Deep and those who may take him to court both recognize that by marrying instant messaging (with a total of 140 million users) and file sharing (which, via Napster alone, has 38 million), Deep has potentially created an Internet super-app as obvious as the company's name: AIM plus Napster equals Aimster.
No Egghead Required
Even before Al Gore hogged credit for think-tanking the Web into being, peer-to-peer file sharing has back-and-forthed data around the world, but nothing about it excited the public until Shawn Fanning began using it to transfer MP3 files from one music fiend's PC to another in 1999.
The problem for Fanning has been that Napster's central index provides the RIAA with its legal bull's eye. Two newer technologies, however, Gnutella and Freenet, rely on "distributed indexes" that reside on users' hard disks and lack a Napster-like point of vulnerability from which they can be stopped. Gnutella and Freenet would scare the bejesus out of the music industry - except you need to be a virtual MIT egghead to work them.
But now comes Aimster, which has neither the vulnerability issues of
