Wide World of Women

I'm a software developer, have been for about a decade now. It's as much a hobby as it is a career for me, so I'm always looking for interesting side projects that make my other hobbies (such as browsing this forum) better. Today, while browsing this forum, I had an idea and I wanted to run it past you all before I devoted the significant amount of time that would be required to develop it.

Of late, the trend has been to use sites like Rapidshare, Megaupload, etc to share videos, and Imageshare/bam to share pictures. The pictures aren't really a problem, however videos are large and disk space/bandwidth isn't cheap, so sites like that cost money. Not to mention the fact that we all use a variety of different providers so paying for one just annoys you when the videos you want are on another.

So what I'm proposing is to take us back to our file sharing roots. A home grown app like Napster targeted specifically at this community and others like it (like superiorpics). The problem with an app like that is that it's only as good as the people that use it which is why I'm putting this feeler out first.

Now the obvious downside is that bandwidth for file transfers would be coming from your own internet connection. I would combat this with the following:
-The app would have a configurable bandwidth limit. You could set it to only use x amount of bandwidth at any given time. I would also make it so that you could schedule that bandwidth limit. So you could set an upload limit of like 50k/s during the day and a higher one (if you wanted) while you were sleeping.
-It would have configurable daily, weekly and monthly upload limits. I know providers like Comcast have a monthly limit on data transfers so you would be able to configure the app to only allow x amount of traffic every day/week/month.
-True p2p file sharing, so if you're the video poster someone will have to get it from you. At that point the next person would get it from you and that other person, so on and so forth so that as the file propagates the bandwidth commitment is split.

The upsides are numerous, the biggest one being - I'm writing it. So I could make it do whatever we want.

Imagine this: you're bored on a Super Bowl Sunday and your browsing ykcim's latest Anne Marie Warnkross posts. Instead of a rapidshare link at the bottom, there's a link that the app recognizes that queues that video for download. You realize you really like Anne Marie, so you go into the app and search for her, and you can see all the videos of her with screen caps right in the app so you can queue up more downloads. Then you decide that you really really like her so you flag her and the app would then notify you whenever new videos or pictures are posted of her by ANYONE.

Imagine seeing a post of images that you want and not having to individually open and save each one. Just click a button and the whole set gets downloaded!

I would take great care to not make the app a replacement for this community but an addition to it. I think that is a very important consideration that should go into this design. I want this app to be integrated with this forum and not completely stand alone. I'd like to make it very friendly for posters too. Auto uploads to image sharing sites, auto bbcode generation stuff like that.

So, what do you guys think? If I wrote it would you use it? The longer this thread gets the more likely I am to do it and I'd like to hear feedback from colored names. If there's no interest I won't waste my time though because it would really only work if the majority of content providers on this forum adopted it.

If you like the idea I'm also interested in hearing what you would like to see it do. I'd like to make it great for all of us.

Sorry for the late reply to this. If it would work, it would be great. Are you thinking a torrent type app or something like Pando?

The only downside is newsbabe videos are a niche and usually only get a handful of downloads. With the limited people with the files and the lack of willingness for everyone to share would it be possible?

It would definitely work more like a torrent application than anything else. I'm investigating various P2P systems to extract the bits I like. It will ultimately come down to what's best for what we're trying to do. It will definitely be a hybrid of existing technologies because A) they're proven and B) it's faster to develop.

I have been thinking about it a lot the last couple days, and you're right if enough people in a niche don't grab hold it probably wouldn't be successful, and there is a pretty large gap from one niche to another. However, even given that I think we can make it work, for a few reasons.

It's appealing on a budget level because people will download more if they're not paying anything.
It's appealing on a laziness level because I think people will share more if they don't have to do anything.
We wouldn't be replacing current practices, just augmenting and hopefully enhancing them.

That said, there's still an additional dimension we could take this to which is cloud storage. What I'm thinking on that front is, a premium level membership which is by no means meant to make money, but to split the cost of the cloud storage space/bandwidth and eliminate each participating person's cost for membership to sites like RapidShare & MegaUpload, etc. At the same time keeping the convenience that exists for people that pay for those memberships. Remember that those membership sites charge enough to both make money and use to their advantage the fact that some people are more active and cost them more than others. Some people just feed them money for nothing. This app would be more appealing if you were in the latter group obviously, but would eliminate the profit overhead.

In that scenario, the cloud would hold on to the last x number of items posted and premium members would have access to the cloud as kind of a proxy torrent seed. In that paradigm it could be successful with a small number of participants. Ultimately there's a lot to consider with that kind of approach because you don't want to alienate people and I certainly don't want to provide a platform for elitism.

When you get right down to it though, it's meant to do two things:

Enhance your experience: Notify you when new content of your favorites are posted, downloading favorites with a single click/automatically, enhanced searching capabilities, etc.
Pool Resources: Time, money, work, bandwidth, storage, etc.

I can make something useful work with just two interested and active participants, it's just that the design changes dramatically based on the number of people involved, and how those people plan to use it. That's why I wanted to get a feel first.

Like I said originally though, I can make this application do anything. So picture whatever you'd like to see happen and we can start from there.