There has been talk recently about the decline of gnutella, with user numbers steadily decresing into the 50,000 range. However, it turns out that these low user statistics were not accurate, due to outdated protocol used by Limewire’s host crawler.
From a story on Slyck:
“The host crawler previously used only counted clients using the 0.4 handshake, an obsolete communications protocol used by older Gnutella clients. This has lead to LimeWire’s host count to report an inaccurate number of hosts. With the introduction of newer programs, fewer people have been using 0.4 compatible clients. In order to display more accurate information, the crawler has been upgraded to include clients that support 0.6 handshaking.”
With the upgrade, the number of gnutella users is now estimated to be closer to 100,000.
This is definitely good news for gnutella users. Read the full story here.
