BitTorrent’s Bleep, A peer-to-peer messaging and chat client has been unveiled on the 30th of July 2014. Its currently in Pre-Alpha release with limited invite to testers. Bleep offers offers users freedom to communicate over text and voice, person to person without the “middle-man”.
The idea of BitTorrent applies distributed technology to conversations with no servers (middle-man) required. This assures people using Bleep to make a direct, decentralized connection to someone they trust. Bleep offers the freedom to communicate without the risk of metadata being exposed. Which means with current set of tracing tools, your messages are clear of easy prying eyes.
With growing susceptibility of communications platforms to easy snooping and hacking, BitTorrent is taking their business embattled peer-to-peer file sharing concept, and applies it to peer-to-peer or person-to-person direct messaging. Their unique position as a peer-to-peer file sharing enabler does give them a unique capability well ahead of the industry.
Does this unique approach to messaging offer a potential for Telcos to invest into? Could Telco’s leverage this as a transformation of SMS? The folks at BitTorrent have already set out an open interworking strategy as part of their business model. This means the mobile service provider community could get on board now and leverage full multimedia messaging in one app to offer mobile users options of secure and localized messaging services as an evolution of SMS.
Resuscitating SMS was a blog i shared a week ago about Telcos need to re-invent SMS in order to mitigate the global decline in usage.