Two weeks ago, Ian Clarke, creator of Freenet, quietly released an early-prototype of a new file-sharing application which appears to be quite a departure from his previous work.
The new application is called “Locutus” and is built on Microsoft’s .Net framework, which is currently only available on Windows and FreeBSD, but should soon be available on Linux too.
To quote from the website:
Basically, Locutus is like Google for the hard-disks of you and your co-workers.
If you have ever had to email your co-workers to hunt down a document you should instantly understand the value of Locutus.
You just enter some search-terms into the discrete search-box which Locutus places above your task-tray, and Locutus will almost instantly search your hard disk, and the shared directories of anyone else on your LAN, for MS Word, MS Powerpoint, or text documents which contain those keywords.
You can read some more about Locutus and download the prototype at http://locut.us/prototype/. Those who do are invited to join a mailing list, and to give the developers any feedback they might have. Again, it is at an early stage of development, but this is probably a great opportunity to get the developers to take your opinion into account before the final version.
