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Old June 19th, 2002
jilles
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Default webpage initiated downloads

I was reading this discussion on ooodocs.org on how convenient it would be if openoffice could be distributed to users in a p2p fashion when it occured to me that limewire would be perfect for the job. It would need only minor modifications:

- The ability to start a search from a webpage. This could be done in a way similar as webstart applications are started: place some xml file on a webserver and associate a mimetype with it and let the browser decide that limewire should handle files of a particular mime-type. The file itself could be a small xml file specifying the name of the file and the hash key and perhaps some additional metainformation. An obvious extension would be to be able to specify multiple downloads in one file. Proposed mimetype: gnutella/download

- The ability to verify the integrity of a download. This can probably be done with hashing??

IMHO this would be a killer application for gnutella and it is extremely easy to implement. Imagine just clicking on a link and see limewire swarm the file to your disk (where it is of course automatically shared). I'd say this would convince hundreds of thousands of people to install gnutella.
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