Manolito P2P, or mP2P, is a file sharing protocol developed Pablo Soto, a spanish programmer. Back in 2001, it was part of the big explosion of P2P protocols, and considered as a new hope by many. Go to the official site for more.
Notable clients were Piolet, Blubster and Manolito. The advantage to other networks were technical in nature; for example, mP2P is completely based on UDP instead of TCP (TCP was added later), which ought to make the network faster. Because of the decentralized concept, it cannot be easily censored and doesn’t rely on central servers (although, strictly speaking, clients still need “Gateways” to bootstrap into the network).
For a while, it seemed to gain quite a few users, but in the end it remained an underdog. Still, Piolet and Blubster were very fast and lightweight clients, and many people were quite fond of it.
Good Features For Its Time, But Now Outdated
It features hashlinks for easily finding files, but unfortunately no indexing sites are to be found, so you can only use it to share links to files with friends. Also, it is said to be anonymous by separating file requests from the actual download. We are sceptical of this claim though, and in the present climate it is unwise to think such small, technological tricks will really protect your privacy.
Build for music only, it reminds a bit of Napster or Soulseek, although we would recommend Soulseek if you really want to go for music.
Unfortunately, the project was abandoned when creator Pablo Soto fell ill. The official websites of Blubster, Piolet and Manolito are all not available anymore, although you can still get the software on some places online.
Apparently Defunct: The Clients
We tried to connect the network, but it seems to be dead: Blubster wouldn’t connect, and although theoretically, there could still be some people using it, you’d have to get hold of a list of active peers to get it running. If you’re an enthusiast, go ahead and see if you can find something of the like, but to us it seems the network is dead for good.
Luckily, there a loads of other networks around.
