Napster was good for a while. But what about now that the courts have "lain down the law?" What's it like now that Napster is filtering content and users are bailing like ravers at a Gwar show? Can you say "sucks on ice?" I knew you could.

By "sucks on ice", I am of course referring to the lack of songs and the increased slowdown of the system as all my queries are repeatedly parsed and parsed again looking for potentially dangerous copyright infingement. So given that Napster's got nothing left to offer me, where can I guy like me go to share music with other like-minded individuals? Gnutella? No, too slow... IMesh? No, the interface sux... Freenet? No, that's too complicated... KaZaA? yeah, kazaa baby...

KaZaA is more or less the same as the Napster you all know and loved, but with a few key differences to take it all the way to the top. First, it's not just mp3 files. You can put anything there, like imesh and gnutella without the hassle of wrapping and unwrapping files (see wrapster). You can put any kind of files you want there, music videos, other video files (read "pr0n"), l337 0-day war3z (sorry, it just too fun making fun of the 'l33t' crowd). Plus, you can view the files all from a convenient player at the bottom. I used to like to "user surf" with Napster, where I would find somebody who had something I liked, and see what else they had. You can't do that here (at least I haven't figured out how to yet), which I think might be a feature (privacy)... too bad, though. There is a little bar at the bottom that says how many users are on and how many files are being shared. Right now, there are 220616 users on KaZaA sharing a total of 86652 Gig of data. I love it.



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