Social this, social that. Looks like everything is being socialized these days—but not the American health care system, zing!—so it only makes sense for someone to try to socialize BitTorrent. It doesn’t hurt when that “someone” is the people behind IsoHunt, who just launched Hexagon.cc, a message board/social network hybrid built around sharing content.
It’s not all torrents and candy, though. Right now, it just seems to be a message board filled with all sorts of dedicated groups, with a smattering of torrents here and there. You know: anime, Apple, /b/, etc. Groups can even be set behind a firewall of sorts, ostensibly shielding your activities from prying eyes. But, hardly what I’d consider a revolution.
One group, apps, has 22 torrents of different, yes, applications. There’s really nothing there you couldn’t find anywhere else.
I’m patently not impressed, but the site is new so there’s that to consider. You also need an invite to join it, something TorrentFreak has in abundance.
the only way it will not fail is by not blocking contents people actually want.
it won’t go very far if all you get is “Look, I’ve just made a Bing song, sharing this with everybody using BitTorrent”
I personally don’t think that Hexagon.cc is going to do very well.
You have to be invited or accepted into groups. This means you are going to have a fraction of seeders available to you. As of right now it’s taking 3+ days to download a music CD.
Also, it takes a while to navigate to what you’re looking for, assuming it even exists on this jacked up site/webapp.
Let’s be honest, the only reason it’s parent site isohunt.com had any success was because it leached most of its seeders from mininova & piratebay.
The site is very laggy with just a few thousand users at a given time.
Now for the big one, it appears that groups will be ran just like an IRC room. In other words, bans flying everywhere. People looking for a torrent don’t want to mess around with all this teenybopper social crap. They want their file.
IMHO, this site justifies paying for a premium newsgroup account. At least newsgroups are truly anonymous and serve files as fast as you can download them. Most decent torrents, Audio, Video, or Software, came from a newsgroup in the first place.
I predict Hexagon.cc will ultimately be limited to a group of younger teens sharing relatively lame & small files.
I agree that it is nothing big right now. However, this site really does have potential. If users actually join and contribute some relevant content, I feel it could take off. I’m a studio engineer, and a musician. I think it’d be great to have a session sharing group with large files being swapped. It would be nice to share mixes with people in a private group as well. I know that there are free ways and pay ways to do that already without hexagon.cc. I just like the idea of a free, social approach to large file sharing..