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Use of Kazaa File Swapping Tool Skyrockets

Peer-to-peer network has grown by 70 percent in two months, as rival Morpheus has seen usage dive.

Scarlet Pruitt, IDG News Service

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The size of Kazaa's peer-to-peer file sharing network ballooned by nearly 70 percent over the last two months, while rival file-swapping system Morpheus, which has recently undergone a platform change, has experienced a precipitous decline, Redshift Research reported Wednesday.

Users have swarmed to Sharman Networks' Kazaa since Morpheus switched from the popular FastTrack technology to a Gnutella application in early March, the researcher notes.

The week before the switch, Morpheus, run by Streamcast Networks, was temporarily shut down in what the company claimed was a denial-of-service attack, leaving more than 1 million users unable to connect to the network.

According to the Belmont, Massachusetts, researcher, Kazaa had an average of 1.4 million users logged on to the system at any one time in April, 69 percent more users than it had in February.

Switching Swapping Programs

Meanwhile, Morpheus usage slipped more than 70 percent from February to April. Morpheus boasted an average of 1.08 million users in February, when it was still based on FastTrack, but by April the Gnutella network, which includes Morpheus and similar file-swapping programs LimeWire and BearShare, averaged 280,000 users, Redshift says.

Redshift Research President Matt Bailey points to Morpheus's platform switch as accounting for the network's massive loss of users. After the switch, users had to download the new Gnutella application, which was basic in nature and ate up a lot of bandwidth, Bailey says.

Although Bailey predicts that Morpheus will soon launch a much better software client than it currently has, he notes that it is difficult to regain users once they have migrated to another network.

Meanwhile, Kazaa is benefiting from Morpheus's troubles, despite the recent reports of the software's implementation of "spyware." Although Bailey says that he was surprised that users were not more concerned about hidden software programs, he saw this as yet another sign of the unfettered popularity of P-to-P networks.

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