Brandon Wiley Explains Revolutionary Concept Ringlight
January 06, 2009
Ringlight is awesome. Take files on your desktop and share them with your friends in any format. Or just yourself. Or everyone. Shoot gigabytes of movie footage or write a simple word doc and then send them to your editor across the world. It doesn't matter. Ringlight allows people to share files very quickly and easily in any format and any size. I caught up with Brandon Wiley, Ringlight's creator and P-2-P technology specialist.
MICHELLE:
You used to work for BitTorrent and therefore know quite a bit about
peer-to-peer technology. Why is this technology not adopted by some of
the bigger sites?
BRANDON:
This is an interesting question because my role at BitTorrent was specifically running product management for the B2B side of the company. I've talked to pretty much everyone about using BitTorrent for their business: video sites, entertainment companies, ISPs, game companies, social networking sites, content delivery networks. We did actually meet with some success, particularly with file hosting solutions (such as Amazon S3) where there is a very direct financial incentive to reducing bandwidth. The product I worked on at BitTorrent (called BitTorrent DNA) enlarges that market by extending BitTorrent to work with streaming, which is particularly interesting in the Internet video space, as everything is moving towards streaming.
Where BitTorrent hasn't been adopted it's because BitTorrent focuses on only one use case: you have a large file, and you want to distributed it to many people simultaneously. A lot of the businesses I talk to have different problems. Facebook, for example, has a different problem. They have countless image thumbnails to distribute to lots of users, but each user is viewing a different set of thumbnails and each individual thumbnail is pretty small. BitTorrent can't help here, and while you could build something on top of BitTorrent to solve this problem, it's really a different product and not part of what BitTorrent is trying to accomplish.
This is part of what I'm trying to do with Ringlight, to serve the unfilled niche for consumers, professionals, and small businesses that isn't filled by existing peer-to-peer solutions such as BitTorrent. Ringlight is designed for sharing all of the files on your computer, a vast collection of mostly small files, to a small group of people: friends, family, coworkers, or maybe just yourself.
MICHELLE:
I've used Ringlight, and it uploads quite fast and is very easy to use. Do you see Ringlight replacing something like FTP?
This is an interesting question because my role at BitTorrent was specifically running product management for the B2B side of the company. I've talked to pretty much everyone about using BitTorrent for their business: video sites, entertainment companies, ISPs, game companies, social networking sites, content delivery networks. We did actually meet with some success, particularly with file hosting solutions (such as Amazon S3) where there is a very direct financial incentive to reducing bandwidth. The product I worked on at BitTorrent (called BitTorrent DNA) enlarges that market by extending BitTorrent to work with streaming, which is particularly interesting in the Internet video space, as everything is moving towards streaming.
Where BitTorrent hasn't been adopted it's because BitTorrent focuses on only one use case: you have a large file, and you want to distributed it to many people simultaneously. A lot of the businesses I talk to have different problems. Facebook, for example, has a different problem. They have countless image thumbnails to distribute to lots of users, but each user is viewing a different set of thumbnails and each individual thumbnail is pretty small. BitTorrent can't help here, and while you could build something on top of BitTorrent to solve this problem, it's really a different product and not part of what BitTorrent is trying to accomplish.
This is part of what I'm trying to do with Ringlight, to serve the unfilled niche for consumers, professionals, and small businesses that isn't filled by existing peer-to-peer solutions such as BitTorrent. Ringlight is designed for sharing all of the files on your computer, a vast collection of mostly small files, to a small group of people: friends, family, coworkers, or maybe just yourself.
MICHELLE:
I've used Ringlight, and it uploads quite fast and is very easy to use. Do you see Ringlight replacing something like FTP?
BRANDON:
That's exactly right. One of the responses I sometimes get from people when I talk about using Ringlight to share their files is, "Why not just run an FTP server on my desktop?" A very astute question and in answering that question you reveal a lot of what Ringlight does.
Ringlight keeps an up-to-date, searchable index of all your files on the website. It keeps track of all of your computers so that you don't need to remember their IP addresses to fetch files. Instead, you just navigate to the file you want on the website and hit the download button. It also takes care of getting around firewalls. You don't need to make accounts for people in order for them to access your files. It's all handled through the website and you can give people access to a particular file or folder to your whole collection by their e-mail address. Additionally, you can have any files or folders mirrored to online storage so that you and anyone else with access can get to the files even when your computers is offline.
MICHELLE:
What are some of the more interesting uses you've seen for Ringlight?
That's exactly right. One of the responses I sometimes get from people when I talk about using Ringlight to share their files is, "Why not just run an FTP server on my desktop?" A very astute question and in answering that question you reveal a lot of what Ringlight does.
Ringlight keeps an up-to-date, searchable index of all your files on the website. It keeps track of all of your computers so that you don't need to remember their IP addresses to fetch files. Instead, you just navigate to the file you want on the website and hit the download button. It also takes care of getting around firewalls. You don't need to make accounts for people in order for them to access your files. It's all handled through the website and you can give people access to a particular file or folder to your whole collection by their e-mail address. Additionally, you can have any files or folders mirrored to online storage so that you and anyone else with access can get to the files even when your computers is offline.
MICHELLE:
What are some of the more interesting uses you've seen for Ringlight?
BRANDON:
Here's a fun example of when Ringlight came in handy. My girlfriend and I went to a party at my friend's ranch way out in Lexington, Texas. She had made an awesome DJ mix for the party, but had accidentally left it at home. It was too far to drive back and get it, so she just logged into her Ringlight account and downloaded it from her home computer. The party was saved!
I use Ringlight a lot for sharing files between operating systems at home. I have computers running Windows, Linux, and OS X, as well as a number of virtual machines and servers. It's a pain to get any kind of traditional filesharing working on all of those. I just install a Ringlight client on each machine and they all show up in my account on the website. I can download files from any of them just using a web browser. It's very convenient.
MICHELLE:
How do you ensure that Ringlight is secure?
Here's a fun example of when Ringlight came in handy. My girlfriend and I went to a party at my friend's ranch way out in Lexington, Texas. She had made an awesome DJ mix for the party, but had accidentally left it at home. It was too far to drive back and get it, so she just logged into her Ringlight account and downloaded it from her home computer. The party was saved!
I use Ringlight a lot for sharing files between operating systems at home. I have computers running Windows, Linux, and OS X, as well as a number of virtual machines and servers. It's a pain to get any kind of traditional filesharing working on all of those. I just install a Ringlight client on each machine and they all show up in my account on the website. I can download files from any of them just using a web browser. It's very convenient.
MICHELLE:
How do you ensure that Ringlight is secure?
BRANDON:
Privacy and security are top priorities from the ground up. To start with, everything is SSL encrypted. Additionally, the Ringlight client authenticates all access with the server. No one can access your files unless you explicitly grant them permission and you can revoke that permissions at any time and the changes will take effect instantly. Security and privacy are partly what keeps people from putting all of their files on a server or in Google Docs. However, with Ringlight file transfers are peer-to-peer from the computer that has the file to the computer where you are downloading the file, secured via SSL encryption. My servers don't see any of your private information. Even if you opt to have files stored online for redundancy, I don't store them for you directly. I create an account for you on Amazon S3 and files go directly from your computer to S3. Your information is entirely private from end to end.
MICHELLE:
How do you see this technology affecting how people can collaborate on projects around the world?
BRANDON:
Ringlight was created partly because I do a lot of online collaboration. I use Google Docs extensively, and sometimes people ask me, "Why not just use Google Docs for everything?" That might be nice if you only every create very basic Word documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. I have more complex needs, and that's why Ringlight supports all files types, any file size, and any number of files. There are no restrictions on what you can share with Ringlight, which is really great when you need to send a client a really giant Photoshop file, a dilemma which has happened to the best of us in the web development world.
Another collaboration problem which Ringlight solves is the difficulty of sharing files with people when you're all sitting in the same room, at a conference, in a coffee shop, or in the office. It's time-consuming and wasteful to e-mail files to people that are sitting next to you, particularly large files. Ringlight takes care of this automatically. Send them a link to the file on the website and Ringlight will use the fastest route available to transfer the file, in this case the local network instead of over the Internet.
MICHELLE:
(insert shameless plug here)
BRANDON:
Ringlight is currently in open beta. You can sign up at http://ringlight.us/.
Comments
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Great interview Michelle. I've met Brandon a couple of times and heard him discuss the concept for Ringlight, but I haven't been able to do explain it as well as I like when telling others about it. That's a shame, because it's a cool concept and Brandon is smart as hell (I can see him doing some great things with this). Now I can point people to this post.
Posted by: Alex S. Jones | January 07, 2009 at 05:37 PM