Would it be that hard to add im's... sometimes it is really helpful when you can accually communicate with someone that you want to download from.

Also chat rooms would be cool, but i don't think it is feasible with the gnotella network... but i don't see anything against IM's

thanks!

Gack. If IM is allowed, be certain to provide a way to opt out.

Nothing worse than trying to work on something with 5 kiddies banging on your door with IM requests...

I agree totally - I think if you want instant messaging go use Napster or IRC.

I think adding IM is not a bad idea but it needs to have an ignore thing to it so you can just get messages from the people you choose to get messages from and everyone else can f uck off. And for those who just wan't to be icq dic ks and send IM's to everyone they can have their fun as well, as long as the IM's are not on the same network as the files, i will be happy

i also thought that it would be nice to communicate with gnu-net-up-downloaders. some days ago i watched s.o. who tried to dl some rare punk/hc files from my comp, but i had to kick him/her because i had to do other things in the i-net. i could have told him/her to try it again in the following night!!
an IM with the option to block/bann the idiots would be nice.

I started working on an Gnutella IMing servent over the summer, but ran into a couple of problems with the protocol. The most obvious is that GnutellaNet seems to have ground to a screeching halt...I never seem to find more than 600 hosts, and it takes forever to do even that. Any IMing service needs to be able to see every host on the network to be useful, so we need to resolve the Gnutella performance/network visibility issues before I can do an IMing program.

Also, the protocol's not very friendly to new services being added. I had hoped to tag the extra fields necessary (screen names, IPs) onto the PING payload, but the GnutellaDev recommendations about validating payload sizes are more widely implemented now. I could tack the extra fields onto a QUERY message, but that just means more processing work for the filesharing servents, and potentially network congestion from spurious QUERY_HITS. I'm hoping GnutellaNG will provide an extensibility mechanism into the protocol itself without resorting to hacks.

And for all you filesharing purists concerned with bandwidth/annoyance, I would only use the GnutellaNet to locate other servents, doing the actual IMing by direct TCP/IP connection. And yes, there would be a way to block certain IPs, and even restrict it only to "known" servents.

This would be pretty damn easy really. All they would have to do is switch the http file transfer with a chat connection. That is all the limewire team did.

Then if we just create a seperate client that uses a different connection stream so we would have our own designated network for chatting rather then mixing up our bandwidth with the file transfer people.

Chat connections could be secure and verified based on simple PGP connections.

Search key word's and returns are simply unique userID's attached to a nickname.

That be the first working bones for the first decentralized instant messaging system? It could kill AIM and all the rest, if anyone has the balls to make it.