Swarming is ok, we'll probably move towards stuff like that in the future, but right now there's still some more important improvements to be made to the file sharing system.

Segmented downloading is really working great on gnutella, very versitile, files of the same size in bytes are grouped together and used as sources for a single download. Corrupt chunks are filtered out by using roll-back verification, which compares the overlapping ends of chunks to make sure they contain the same data. In real world distribution this is working 100% of the time, and corrupt chunks rarely even come up. Good news, but there's more to be done.

BearShare has contributed the proposals to search and share with file hashes. Also another cool contribution by BearShare is the X-Alternate-Location header, which comes up when you start downloading from a host, it will give you a list of other hosts with the same file. Often these hosts are beyond your viewable horizon, very useful feature.

UltraPeers proposal by LimeWire is cool also, Gnucleus and BearShare will support it soon. Basically it should expand the viewable network by a factor of 20 or more if all hosts are using it, also it will lessen the bandwidth needed by nodes to be part of the network.

The best of gnutella is still ahead.