some guy whose name i don't remember pointed out on the gdf that many p2p networks offer chat in order to get users to stay online. He's totally right. Napster had a chat. Morpheus has a chat. It seems to me that every file sharing tool except gnutella clients has a chat implemented. why shall i sit and wait for a download when i can talk to other people ? when i have an interesting talk, i stay online and other people can download from me. i don't care about it because i don't need much of my bandwidth when chatting. it is one of the very things that i expect from a p2p client. Gnucleus has implemented an irc chat feature and i love it. problem is: About 5% of gnutella users use gnucleus and the channel #gnutella/chat remains empty. almost. 10 users, most don't want to chat. Limewire and Bearshare together hold more than 50% of the market. if they would implement the irc feature than the problem would be solved. it is fearly easy to do and the network would profit from their users being connected for a longer time, thus decreasing the probability that a download breaks down before it is finished.

Next Point: I think John Marshall's proposal tu use irc channel #gnutella/cache as a pong cache and grouping system is simply brilliant. It is certainly harder to close down an irc server than a permanent node, and it has the advantage that only hosts that accept incoming connections are found. I really like the idea of Gnutella being tied to irc to become a full-featured chat-and-exchange-community. what's wrong with tieing to a globally accepted protocol ? chatting and sharing belong together, thats clear - they both are ways to offer free speach and free information exchange!