Word: aimster
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...Former Napster devotees - 60 million of my closest filesharing friends - have been glumly awaiting The One from the moment Shawn Fanning's brainchild felt the back of the music label's legal hand. BearShare, LimeWire, Aimster, FreeNet - all of these alternative MP3 swapping services have had their moment in the media spotlight. Plenty of pundits, yours truly included, were eager to anoint at least one of them as Napster's successor . All had their own get-out-of-jail-free cards, in that they had no central server (unlike Napster) and therefore no way of knowing you were deliberately seeking...
...crop of programs that used Gnutella technology; but the way Gnutella works means you're largely limited to rifling through the collections of 25,000 virtual neighbors. Close but no cigar, as Thomas Dolby sang (and you'd have little chance of finding that track, for one). Aimster had the neat idea of piggybacking on AOL's instant messenger service, but it turned out to be plagued by bugs. And if anyone without a computer science degree has managed to master FreeNet's baffling interface, I'd like to hear from them...
...Dutch company called FastTrack (yes, this is something else to thank Amsterdam for). The second you download it, you know it's different. There's no off-putting server sign-on sequence like in the Gnutella programs. No lengthy process of scanning for music on your machine like Aimster makes you go through. Just a search page that returns results at a speed not seen since Napster. This is partly the fact that FastTrack is so focused on the end user experience, and partly the fact that plenty of people are using it already. A million of us downloaded Morpheus...
Calling Johnny Deep a music innovator for developing Aimster, his song-swapping Web service, is a disservice to all the people who make music for a living and who live to make music. Isn't Deep ripping off all the songwriters and musicians when he enables Aimster users to obtain music for free? What was TIME thinking? MARK D. SANDERS Nashville, Tenn...
Although he won't say it in so many words, Deep's aim is to keep the spirit of Napster alive. Just in case his legal maneuver doesn't work, he is already parlaying Aimster's notoriety into a business of building secure networks for corporations. Aimee is mulling a career in modeling. In the meantime, thanks to her angst at 13, free music has a face to take Shawn Fanning's place. --By Chris Taylor