The Web 2.0 Show - A podcast about the new web - Episode - Episode B4 - Travis Kalanick at BarcampLA

bybemson added May 05, 2006

Your latest podcast piqued my interest in redswoosh. Until it's an open source thang, I wouldn't count on this being of any value to consumers - despite the claimed speed increase. You might also consider some due diligence with your interviewees. You may not consider yourself a journalist outfit, but surely there is a social contract for publishers!? Learn more, follow up and notify... http://www.auditmypc.com/process/rsednclient.asp - laterz

byjanie added May 05, 2006

WHERE do i download it from their site? the contact form ask me for a URL, i am just a user, do i really need to sign up to start using this? mmm... before of the spyware regarding the previous comment ... all these client side applications/plugins that are not open source.. are... mmm. well, they don't make me feel confortable.

byNick Dynice added May 08, 2006

Well, I had no idea. Travis seems like a pretty upstanding guy, as I met him in person and watched him demonstrate the software to a large audience. It probably would be in his best interest to make the source code available to the client app as to help convince people that it will not make their computers vulnerable. But yeah, if you Google RedSwoosh, the number 3 link is about it possibly being spyware. This would have been a great question to ask him in the interview if I had researched it.

byTravis Kalanick added May 08, 2006

Hey guys. Let me provide some additional info on our product and on questions brought up above: Is Red Swoosh open-source? Red Swoosh has opened its protocol and has a widely available API, but it has not yet open-sourced its client software. That could change in the coming months, as we re-launch our site providing much more developer tools and references, and start supporting the bittorrent protocol. We just started up a blog at http://blog.redswoosh.net that will cover some of these changes that are coming (keep in mind that we only have a few posts as the blog is in its early days). Is Red Swoosh spyware/adware/malware/etc? Red Swoosh is absolutely NOT spyware/adware/malware or anything else of the sort. All we do is act as a P2P content delivery tool. The user clicks on links on a Red Swoosh publisher (swooshed links) and our client makes sure to retrieve the content from idle PC's that have already gotten the content. We do not capture any personal information. We do track any user activity. We have never popped an ad to a user. We do not surreptitiously install on your machine. We of course make sure our client is easy to uninstall. The point is that we are a polite application that respects the user, their PC and their trust. So why do some sites mistakenly call Red Swoosh spyware? Well, this is one of the most frustrating things about building an application that is polite and non-obtrusive. These websites see this client running in the background without a tray icon, and to our fault, not enough product marketing, and the websites assume that the software must be bad. Now, Microsoft Defender, Symantec, McAfee, and the other major players do not identify us, but it is primarily the smaller guys who have made assumptions without looking into what our software really does. We take a conciliatory approach with these websites and applications (there are 7 apps and a few website XML feeds that misidentify us), and show them what we do, and that we are good guys. We'd like to do more to work with these guys and educate folks about our stuff, but we're still a small company, and there are only so many hours in the day. We certainly encourage our customers (websites), and their users to also notify these sites about the discrepancy here and urge that we get taken off. Any help from the community would be greatly helpful I hope that answers your questions, I know it's a bit of a rant, but if there are any more queries or feedback, etc, i'll be happy to check in here often to respond. Thanks, Travis

byNick Dynice added May 09, 2006

Thanks, Travis. I think through blogging, giving your presentation at BarCampLA presentation, and granting me the interview, this shows they you guys are a transparent company with no bad intentions. I mean, spyware vendors don't blog. It will be great to see the community win over the spyware listing sites to get you removed from the list and gain more users.

bymeme added May 10, 2006

I wILL CREATE aN ENTERTAINMENTINFRASTRUCTE they WILL LOG ON I WILL CONTROL THEM, I WILL RULE the woRLD!

bychristoph added May 18, 2006

Are there show notes for this podcast, or I am just not finding it intuitive to locate them on the site?

byNick Dynice added May 18, 2006

Sorry, the show notes are not that detailed. We don't really make reference to to much other than to the app itself. I do link to redswoosh.com. The real thing to note are all of these comments.

byJason Roberts added May 19, 2006

It sounds like Bemson needs to do a little due dilligence himself. Accusing an entrepreneur's application of being spyware/malware is pretty severe and in this case incorrect. I initially met Travis at the February TechCrunch BBQ and then invited him to join in at BarCampLA, which I co-hosted. I haven't yet had an opportunity to experiment with RedSwoosh, but I did sit in on his presentation at BarCamp and have had numerous conversations with him since. Travis has struck me as being a very open and generous guy and RedSwoosh seems to me to be an extremely clever solution to the distribution of large amounts of content. It's just too bad that it's so easy for people to cast aspersions in the blogosphere, even if they're just misguided. Hopefully, Bemson will take an opportunity to understand the technical details of RedSwoosh and post a retraction on his site.

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