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"If you use toolbar on your browser, you're a tool bag..." the old Internet adage goes. Tool bars are often used by tool bags, often unwittingly installing god-knows-what since many people simply don't pay attention to the installation process. This is the type of competence level that also leads to entire bank statements and personal items to be shared with the world. But perhaps LimeWire's new tool bar has a few interesting tricks?
It actually does - if you're still into P2P. So much has changed in the last 10 years in the file-sharing world that sometimes its hard knowing what role LimeWire plays. When LimeWire was at its peak, P2P applications and networks were the kings of file-sharing. The popularity of these Napster-like programs has steadily declined in the last five years, thanks to streaming media and the BitTorrent juggernaut. LimeWire is the last of the independent, commercial operations.
So what's LimeWire's new tool bar bringing to the table this time? If you guessed Ask.com, you guessed correctly. But there's a few other interesting items as well:
"Magnetize” is a feature that we first launched as a bookmarklet (http://www.LimeWire.com/workshop), but we have now made a permanent fixture in our toolbar. Basically, the toolbar searches the web page you are on to identify links to certain audio, video, image, document and torrent files and enables users to send those files’ locations (all files or just one) to your LimeWire application. When you select individual file names from the drop-down menu (or “get all”), LimeWire is launched and automatically starts downloading the file(s). No more repetitive right-click/”save as” actions. In fact, if they are audio files, LimeWire automatically adds them to your iTunes library."
Of course, tool bars and the hard core file-sharing community simply don't mix - but LimeWire really is no longer part of that crowd anyway. So the reception for this new feature will probably be overall positive - it's kinda cool to be able to search Gnutella and BitTorrent at the flick of your web browser (although perhaps a "lite" version as a search plug-in would be cool). And if you really hate tool bars, there's an opt out during installation.
Date: 2010-02-17 |