BitTorrent's Little Helper

You have to want great technology. Great technology doesn't just happen, and it takes years to perfect the banal. Think of your POTS telephone. Two wires leading into your home that connect you to millions of people around the country and around the world. And when was the last time your landline telephone was on the fritz? Ma Bell has made the telephone downright rock solid, and it only took fifty years!

I say this because right now the Internet population, "netizens" was the catchphrase circa 1996, is on the brink of something wonderful. We have tools at our disposal now that are useful, reliable, and most importantly user-friendly. I call them "BitTorrent" and "RSS". And they are, in my opinion, the heart and soul of the reason why engineers sought to connect their computers to each other in the first place. BitTorrent provides a safe, reliable, checksummed file transfer protocol that is as easy as 1-2-3. Grandmas can learn to use BitTorrent in about ten minutes. RSS, while much less user-friendly than BitTorrent, has been sufficiently candy-coated by numerous companies online to make getting your own syndication feed a given. Sign up for a LiveJournal account, or Blogger, or MSN Spaces, and you get RSS as a free add-on. Authors who understand the power of having RSS feeds can notify their audience about updated material without lifting a finger.

And now, we are getting ready to combine the two. I want you to digest the significance of that statement for a moment: BitTorrent can automagically download a file (perfectly, I might add, thanks to its use of the SHA-1 hash algorithm), and RSS can automagically find new files for you to download. If this idea doesn't make your pulse quicken, I have to bring myself to scratch my head and wonder what steams your vegetables. BitTorrent + RSS = Holy Cow!

Problem is, we're not there yet. In fact, we're so close that Zeno himself is standing at the finish line with an electron scanning microscope trying to determine a winner between Achilles and the tortoise. We're so close, yet still so far away.

The big hurdle between "so close Purgatory" and "file transfer Nirvana" is convenience. Reliable file transfer protocols have been around for awhile now. And update/notify software has been around for ages. But neither has been particularly convenient. You aren't going to want to talk your mom through downloading the .NET Framework SDK and writing her own HttpWebRequest class-using software to query web hosts and compare their Last-Modified header field against a homebrew on-disk database. RSS, on the other hand, is as easy as running RSS Bandit or RSSOwl, or, for you MS weenies, plugging NewsGator into your copy of Outlook.

The default BitTorrent client doesn't have a lot of features, but the protocol is open, and there are a bunch of competing clients available for you to use. Most people who try it like Azureus, and Azureus supports its own plugin framework that has two, count them, two RSS feed scanning modules. The idea is simple: .torrent files are created, and then distributed over RSS. (If you can use RSS to distribute your thoughts on the Bush administration or America's love affair with cilantro, why not .torrent data?)

People can use their RSS feed aggregators to check for new .torrent files, and then save the .torrent file locally and pass it to their BitTorrent client. Yawn. A better way to do it is to have the BitTorrent client check the RSS feed itself, find the torrents you care about, mask out the ones you don't, and then download the data. Hey! This is easy!

No, no it isn't. The two Azureus plugins, RSS Feed Scanner and RSS Import, are for shit. Really: they are suck on a cracker. And the big test for these plugins are Leo Laporte's This WEEK in TECH podcast. Podcasting as a whole is ripe for harvest with RSS + BitTorrent, but Leo's podcast is unnaturally popular because it is a weekly reunion of the biggest names from the now defunct TechTV series The Screen Savers. If you're like me, you love the memories of Leo, Patrick Norton, and Kevin Rose doing neat things with new tech, this podcast is as close are you're going to get.

And I can't fucking get Azureus to do it for me. Argh! Now, I totally blame myself: I'm running a pre-release version of Azureus, the cuttingest edge of the development, and the plugins probably aren't up to snuff yet.

And therein lies the rub: yet. I wholly believe that sooner or later Azureus, and a bunch of other BT clients, are going to get good RSS support. Reliable isn't even a must, but convenient is. And eventually, reliability will catch up. Until then, there is a huge potential to push files around that is not being realized.