Manolito Review

Name: Manolito
Homepage: www.Manolito.com
Cost: Adware
Recommended: No

If someone were to draw a family tree for Gnutella, it’d stir up some controversy. LimeWire would be the highest branch. With a bud on it called FrostWire. BearShare would be second highest, blackened by a lightening bolt from the RIAA. Shareaza would have a branch. The G2 network would be symbolized by a long branch steadily growing away from the trunk. Ares would be there. Stretching out toward the FastTrack tree. And then, there’d be Manolito. Arguably, a piece of deadwood.

It all started with Pablo Soto. He studied the Gnutella protocol and concluded that he could make a better version using UDP technology. With Optisoft as his financial backers, he released MP3ByTheFace. This program had very little promotion, but it was the program that started the Manolito P2P network. In June 2001 MP3ByTheFace was replaced with Blubster. MP2P claimed to be anonymous. The nature of UDP reflects that. In TCP, you broadcast a signal and wait for a response. But in UDP you just send out a signal and hope for the best. This makes UDP faster and harder to trace, but less stable. Like its parent Gnutella, it used Sha1 to hash and verify file integrity. But unlike Gnutella, MP2P was only designed to share MP3’s. No movies, no software, not even porn. By February 2002 MP2P was at 3,529 users.

Optisoft didn’t follow the business plan of the Gnutella consortium, they followed Sharman’s example. MP2P was closed source. Versions before 1.2.3 were clean, but later versions had mandatory adware and spyware. MP2P was a for profit network. But the money wasn’t making everyone happy. For an unknown reason, Pablo left Optisoft. Since he was the brains behind the network, development of Blubster halted. But the MP2P network wasn’t prepared to go quietly into the night.

February 2003 Pablo released a MP2P client of his own, Piolet. This program was almost identical to Blubster. The main difference between Blubster and Piolet was Piolet was clean of adware and spyware. This did however leave Pablo short on resources. He bought the domain Piolet.com and turned it into the homepage for his program. With his departure from Blubster, a divide formed in Blubster’s forum. Jaba, jimithing, ToM, Skittles Goddess, and Scythe decided to forum their own forum, P2PForums.com. At that time it had 2 functions, P2P news and the official forum of Piolet. Downloads.com hosted the program itself. At this time the population of MP2P was 80,614 users.

August 2003, Optisoft showed they were still alive by leasing some MP2P code out to Grokster. Grokster was already an established power in the P2P world due to their FastTrack client with the same name. Grokster released RockItNet. This was another adware and spyware client for the MP2P network. However this venture was short lived. In February 2005, Grokster gave up on RockItNet. No reason was ever made public. One would think that with Blubster development halted that MP2P was ready to die, however the population was at 211,769 users.

In December 2004, the P2PForums staff lost contact with Pablo. Pablo essentially cut off communication with everyone associated with Piolet. Then, he went back to Optisoft. While I pride myself on being a nosey person, I can’t find any reasons for Pablo’s actions. Pablo going back to Optisoft was the start of the rebirth of MP2P, but it didn’t happen immediately. It became public knowledge that Pablo had Muscular Dystrophy. This caused the pause in the development of the MP2P network. At this time the population of MP2P was 262,039 users.

Blubster, Piolet and RockItNet were all dead. Blubster had a static webpage and still hosted the program. Piolet was also static and referred people to Downloads.com to get the program. Grokster sold the RockItNet domain and it became a fake search engine. In December 2005 Slyck.com stopped taking stats on MP2P. There was some speculation that the stats were fake. P2PForums removed the Piolet section from their forums. Silence.

A year later, May 2006 out of nowhere Manolito.com was reborn. No longer just a redirect to Blubster.com. The site was 100% new and dedicated to the newest MP2P client, named Manolito. Pablo was back to work at Optisoft. He now had a team of developers working with him. Manolito worked just like any of the other MP2P clients. A clone of Blubster or Piolet. Still MP3’s only. No new features. Mandatory ad banner and opt out spyware.

Making the spyware optional could’ve been a sign that their goal wasn’t making money from file sharing. But their marketing team proved that idea wrong. On May 19th 2006 Piolet.com and Blubster.com went back online. Each claiming to have a new version of their programs. These new versions were just clones of the new Manolito program. Aside from a few new graphics there was no difference. For Blubster, this was a step up, no more mandatory spyware. For Piolet, this was a step down. Manolito was clearly just trying to cash in on any name recognition they had left.

Which brings us to today. According to the program itself, MP2P has 267,947 users. That makes it twice the size of G2 or 1/8th the size of Gnutella. Manolito comes in 2 versions. The standard version and Super Manolito. The super version has no adware or spyware. It costs $19.95. Manolito has the standard features of any P2P client. Media library, buddies list, chat feature and a media player. While the nature of UDP is quicker than TCP, MP2P doesn’t give you anything new. The speeds are comparable to that of any other network. It should be noted that the program can be configured to use TCP with UDP, or just TCP.

I like to think I have a good imagination. But I can’t think of 1 good reason why someone would design a P2P network to only handle 1 file type. I look at Napster, it only shared MP3’s. But this was at a time where most people were on dial up. Downloading anything beyond 5mB was just stupid. Today it’s easy to fire up a Gnutella or ED2K client and get a TV show. Maybe concentrating your attention on music and marketing your program as the hardcore music downloading program is a good way to get users. But I ask why would hardcore music fans want MP3’s from an adware program when they can get FLAC’s from Soulseek? Maybe keeping the network free of EXE’s would stop viruses from spreading. But a virus can be in any file and I’m sure if the MP2P network ever grew into a major player we’d see viruses in MP3 form. My final thoughts on the MP3 only network is a call to sanity to those 200,000 users. We can’t have 1 network for each type of media. If there was 1 network for music, 1 for TV shows, 1 for movies, 1 for software 1 for games, etc… We’d be wasting time and bandwidth. When you want a movie, you’d have to spend another few seconds and another 10kB connecting to a new network. We’d need many more search nodes to facilitate searches. And if we chose to run these programs all at once, they’d all be choked for bandwidth, CPU and RAM. It just doesn’t make any sense.

I do not recommend Manolito, Piolet or Blubster. Even if someone makes an adware/spyware free version, I will not use it.

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