some guy whose name i don't remember pointed out on the gdf that many p2p networks offer chat in order to get users to stay online. He's totally right. Napster had a chat. Morpheus has a chat. It seems to me that every file sharing tool except gnutella clients has a chat implemented. why shall i sit and wait for a download when i can talk to other people ? when i have an interesting talk, i stay online and other people can download from me. i don't care about it because i don't need much of my bandwidth when chatting. it is one of the very things that i expect from a p2p client. Gnucleus has implemented an irc chat feature and i love it. problem is: About 5% of gnutella users use gnucleus and the channel #gnutella/chat remains empty. almost. 10 users, most don't want to chat. Limewire and Bearshare together hold more than 50% of the market. if they would implement the irc feature than the problem would be solved. it is fearly easy to do and the network would profit from their users being connected for a longer time, thus decreasing the probability that a download breaks down before it is finished.

Next Point: I think John Marshall's proposal tu use irc channel #gnutella/cache as a pong cache and grouping system is simply brilliant. It is certainly harder to close down an irc server than a permanent node, and it has the advantage that only hosts that accept incoming connections are found. I really like the idea of Gnutella being tied to irc to become a full-featured chat-and-exchange-community. what's wrong with tieing to a globally accepted protocol ? chatting and sharing belong together, thats clear - they both are ways to offer free speach and free information exchange!

From what you are saying, you are asking Limewire and Bearshare to add support for chatting through IRC, which has pretty much nothing to do with the Gnutella Protocol (just to make that clear).

Actually technically, gnutella is a distributed search engine, to download files is like downloading from an HTTP server, and that is why some support an built in mini HTTP server. So searching is distributed and downloading is peer to peer. I would think it would be interesting to create a search engine for users and chat rooms.

IRC in the long run may not that good of a solution beyond Gnucleus, I think (not sure). Because there are thousands of gnutella users, imagine thousands of gnutella users going into a single chat room (#gnutella/chat), I'm not sure if this causes fragmentation or a room to be split (to handle the multiple users), but that would mean you would lose contact with your friends. Having that many users chatting in the same room is not only confusing but also does affect the bandwidth as each person sends a message and that message gets sent out to each user. Plus IRC is a centralized system, that is subject to fallouts of being a centralized system, that is if the IRC server you are connected to finds that it can not handle the capacity of the number of users it will not accept any more users, and if the server is attacked by hackers or has some financial issues and has to shut down, then everyone has to go through some problems and the gnutella clients have to take that into account by diffrent means. But if this is the ideal way to do this, then why bother? If someone really wants to chat on IRC they can just start an fully featured IRC program of their preference.

A more interesting way to chat, is to chat with a person who you are sharing a file with or are going to share a file with. This way people of common interesting can start a conversation with each other, but that is not IRC, that is like ICQ/ AIM type messaging, or it could be set up so that you can create your own chat room, and people who download from you can start chatting in that chat room, or even allow linking chat rooms, so if I am running a chat room I can connect my chat room to someone elses. But my point is that there is more interesting things that can be done that are a bit beyond the scope of IRC. These may be possible using the IRC protocol or other (although I find IRC to have certain limitations).

I never said that there should be ONE channel on ONE server, there could be many channels on many different servers even on different networks, and the servents could determine wether or not the capacity of a channel could easily support more users and try the next if it doesn't. There also is no need for ONE central pong cache, one could have numerous ones and limit the capacity of each to an amount that is suitable. And it is clear to me too that IRC has nothing to do with gnutella. But how do you imagine to chat ? You cannot chat over the gnutella network, perhaps even routing the messages over all the nodes between A and B ? If you don't want to write a totally new chat protocol (why should one ?) you will have to take an existing one, and IRC seems to be pretty good. That's my point:

1) Servents implement chat
2) Users that wait for a download to finish go chatting
3) Users that are chatting might stay there even after the download finished
4) While they are chatting, their bandwidth consumption is next to nothing and they are likely to upload stuff

you know as well as i do that users connect to the GNet, they download their stuff, and then they disconnect, interrupting any uploads. As many users have servents that don't do a good job resuming and re-searching (what Vinnie claims should be totally avoided), this is beating down performance. Other protocols try to implement a lot of ways to have them stay connected, for example they start automatically when windows starts, they do not close but minimize to the tray, and they offer gadgets like chat and online games. All I ask for is a simple irc chat feature, what's wrong with that even if it has nothing to do with the gnutella protocol ? It just belongs together, file exchange and information exchange. and anyway, having a pong cache on irc might seem to be poor, but it seems poor to me too that gnutella is only scalable by 'permanent nodes', which is in fact a server! yes, a server, a CENTRAL entry-point to a DECENTRAL network, which CAN be shut down by law enforcement if the court decides that their only purpose was contributory copyright infringement, even if it does nothing but return ips. that's my point of view.

Again, it increases the size of the gnutella clients, and a user could easily just start an IRC application of their own choice, and there are applications that are created specificly for IRC and will support all the features associated with IRC, that would take a while before the gnutella clients supported all of the nice features.

I dont imagine chatting over the gnutella network because the gnutella network is for searching for location of files and downloading them. The only thing, some thing similar to the gnutella network could be done for chatting is, searching for users or chat rooms but not for actual conversations. Conversations would need to be handled slightly diffrently, instead of sending search requests, it would need to be made to send messages.

The only way IRC would be integrated into a gnutella client is if there was a special relationship between gnutella hosts and IRC. For example, if a user wants to, they could give out information that they are in an IRC chat room, this way when you download a file from someone and wish to talk to them, or if someone is downloading from you and you wish to talk to them, then you could query their gnutella client directly P2P (not through gnutella protocol), and their computer will inform your computer that they are in a chat room, you can then go to that chat room. This way people of common interest could chat with each other. This is the only reasonable way I could imagine IRC being integrated into a gnutella client, in order to make the process seamless, other wise its pointless and users could just download and install and use a real IRC client instead.

I'm not saying chatting will not enhance it, I'm just arguing that if the 2 are unrelated then there is not point in integrating them, because a user can simply run 2 applications at once, rather then users who dont want to chat having an application that takes more memory (bloated) to add in these features they dont use, when it doesnt have to have them. What might be even better, is if the gnutella application could launch the IRC chat client of your choice automaticly connecting to the server and chatroom for you (assuming the IRC client of choice is capable of this automated task), rather then have IRC built into it.

so where can you find quality IRC related to gnutella?