For those of you who haven't heard of BitTorrent -- and a big hello to 99.99% of the population out there! -- it's a technology that allows you to download files, especially large files, a lot quicker than you might expect. In fact, it's specifically designed to make popular downloads, those that are usually the slowest, go the fastest. The more people interested in something, the better. It's a great design and its fundamental trick -- sharing the bandwidth load among everybody accessing a file -- is a wonderful idea.
Unfortunately, everything else about BitTorrent sucks. Hard. Enough to peel paint. Where to begin?
The Clients: To use BitTorrent, you need to install some software on your machine that knows how to read the protocol. There are a bunch of packages to choose from but which you pick is a moot point: they're universally awful. Confusing, amateurish, intimidating (and occasionally riddled with spyware), they all vomit up more information than anybody could possibly care about and manage to make it ugly in the process: rates, seeds, statuses, and a dozen other useless metrics, presented as abbreviations and lists that make little sense to the people who understand what's going on and even less to the uninitiated. It's interface design by stomach virus, brought to you by the minds who think that post-crash stack dumps are helpful. Even the effort to create a simple BitTorrent experience -- BattleTorrent -- is too complicated. "MiB?" What the hell is a "MiB"? "Seeds?" "Dn?"
What do people -- and by "people," I mean human beings, not geeks -- want to use BitTorrent for? To download public-domain video of congressional testimony from C-SPAN, of course. They utterly and completely do not care about what goes into accomplishing that. They want: a progress bar. Tell them how far along the download is. That's it. Nothing else. If you want to do it right, integrate BitTorrent into Mozilla and don't distinguish BT downloads from any other kind. Because, seriously, nobody cares. Astonishing thought here: Hide the complexity. Automatically seed any files you find in the default download folder. That's how Napster did it, and, hey, they had some success. You might have heard of them.
The Lingo: Related to the above, the BitTorrent developers -- geeks in general-- need to stop developing new terminology to describe new technology, or at least stop using it in polite company. The fact that using BitTorrent requires at least a passing familiarity with half a dozen new vocabulary words is ridiculous. Repeat after me: People want to "get" "music" and "videos" from "Web sites." That's it and that's all. They don't want to find trackers with seeds to torrents. I don't care how subtle the nuances of the technology are. I don't care how deeply flawed the existing metaphors would be. Cope. Leave the self-indulgent lingo in some wadded Kleenex in your bedroom and use the words that everybody already knows.
The Server: Setting up a BitTorrent server -- called (for no good reason; see above) a "tracker" -- is just slightly harder than removing your own kidneys. Maintaining one is the rough equivalent of then eating them. For people -- again: human beings, not geeks -- to care that BT exists, for them to bother installing the client, there have to be servers, and for there to be servers, the process of putting one together needs to be a couple order of magnitude simpler than it is now. If it can't be done in fifteen minutes by someone whose experience with the UNIX command line is the ability to copy commands out of the help file, then it simply won't be done. What's so magical about a BT tracker that it has to be so hard to get running? Other than the developers are smug, lazy elitists, I mean.
And seeding torrents to the tracker (see above, again) once it's running needs to be another couple of orders of magnitude simpler than that. Generating and posting torrents must be a single-step process -- wham, bam, thank you intellectual property industry -- done either via bookmarklet or Windows shell extension or whatever fringe weirdness you Mac people have. It needs to be as simple as hosting a file via FTP. If users can't right-click on some camcorder-shot copy of "I, Robot" and share it with the world, well then, what's the point of even having a camcorder-shot copy of "I, Robot"? No, seriously, what's the point? It was terrible.
The Reputation: BitTorrent's last, and biggest, problem is the company it keeps. And I'm not talking about the geeks -- though, really, you guys might want to consider cleaning out your braces every once in a while.
No, BitTorrent's most unsavory fans are the pirates. They love it. It's basically designed for them. Oh, yes, sure, the technology isn't to blame for how it's abused. That honor belongs to the community. For all the hoopla that goes into BitTorrent evangelism, it remains almost exclusively an obscure tool to steal high bandwidth media because nobody has ever bothered to give it a respectable, public face. The creator of BitTorrent owns bittorrent.com and hasn't put anything there. No new user instructions, no links to popular clients, no legal trackers. No nothing. I mean, come on.
The best way to promote BT would be to set up trackers -- excuse me, "Web sites" -- that actually maintain useful, legal content and direct new users to them. Right now, most BT servers have all the class and permanency of off-shore casinos, and because of that, once you install a BT client, you... What? The standard BitTorrent client advises you to, "Find a BitTorrent Web site and click the appropriate links." Hey, thanks.
Where is the BitTorrent version of umich.edu? Every FTP client in the world comes with a list of public-domain download sites, so that after you install the software, you can actually use the software. Nobody does that for BitTorrent because all the useful sites are illegal. Surpnova isn't included as a suggested starting point for the same reason that guns don't come with robbery instructions: Everybody knows that's what they're used for, but you can't just say it.
The BitTorrent community needs to put in the good faith effort to pretend that BT is useful for something other than piracy. At least run one server that will interest the general population (and therefore doesn't consist entirely of Debian distributions or Phish bootlegs) and won't make Jack Valenti foam at the mouth. Just one. Keep it well-maintained, well-known, well-referenced and legal. Make it a starting point for curious newbies, with hand-holding and links to good clients and rounded-off, child-safe corners. You can fake it that much, guys. Even the mob has legitimate fronts.
Don't get me wrong. Even considering all the above, BitTorrent is wonderful technology that accomplishes something that is badly needed. But the guts of any project are exactly that, the guts: they're ugly to look at, hard to put to use without an interface and not the sort of thing you drag out in polite company. Just like Napster put a pretty face on MP3s (and paved the way for the legal iTunes), the BitTorrent community needs to pull its collective head out of its socket and realize that real people want to accomplish real things with their little toy. And that can't happen until they stop playing with it, hose it off and put a pretty pink ribbon around its neck, so it's not so scary.
Get to it.
