I thought I was the only one who felt like that!
Napster was never in a releaseable state. Missing obvious features like resume, and are not conforming to proper search techniques (Like wildcard characters). And why the hell did they limit its capabilities to music?! That's ASKING FOR IT from the RIAA. They would have been as legal as email otherwise...
Gnutella and all Gnutella based applications are horribly slow, buggy, and unable to scale properly to large networks (Including the new Morpheus). The inherant security flaw of allowing search request to pass between users FLOODS the network with bogus results (SPAM!).
Everything else is spyware supported, and all suck serious balls (KaZaa, LimeWire, BearShare, iMesh, and others).
Morpheus was the worst. After realizing that filenames were one the far right column, I was glad to find that you could move them like a standard Windows form, but after a second of organizing it switched to "Title, Title, Description" instead of "Filename. Title, Description" and even an uninstall & reinstall couldn't fix it (Sloppy reg keys). It's happened on every computer I've used it on, and I can't find the registry keys to fix it. On top of that, Morpheus has the same problems as all the other apps and is very near unusable. Thank God it died, but MorpheusPE is MUCH worse.
Sorry for my report, but it can not be complete without some honorable mentions:
CuteMX: Probably the first multi-filetype P2P client "Napster-clone" out there, and it solved EVERYTHING that Napster did wrong. It was a real community, with the ability resume & DCC files and other IRC-like features! It worked with wildcard formatting and came from a reputable company (Though GlobalScape products did install Aureate/Radiate spyware, they operated with it removed). It died as soon as Napster was sued.
Filetopia: The only one built for security from the ground up. Before Napster existed, I came up with the idea for a P2P network myself, except in my vision, it would be a sort of "IRC plugin" that allowed you to share files with people in the same channel ("Chat Room" for you AOLers 😛). Channels would exists for the purpose of sharing certain types of files and you could always start you own. Filetopia is like an IRC-clone, and is nearly identical to what I was thinking of, except you can do a network-wide search and download from eachother totally anonymously. You can even send messages to the file owner without knowing who they are (You CAN'T know until they reply) and recieve replies. It is implementing multi-source segmented downloads, but that's still private beta only. It has always featured "collections" to group needed files together, and you can even search for files that are off-line (No longer on the network) to see what you are missing!
eDonkey: The first to support multi-source segmented downloads, but it is plagued with the problems of the other filesharing apps. It was introduced to share movies on all the DiVX sites, and is therefore the easiest way to find them with. But it only wins awards for being the first like that 🙁 iMesh's crap doesn't count!
FTP, newsgroups and IRC fserve still remain the best way to find releases and file parts to this day, and are even superior for finding whole albums of music, despite the filesharing networks' concentration on music (Filetopia's "Collection" feature will be more useful when more people join the network).
