It's been a while since we took a look at the Napster phenomenon. The last two months tell an interesting story about the file sharing controversy -- and have introduced a new sex symbol to the world of online file sharing.
While Napster remains high on the Lycos 50, it has begun to tail off. Napster searches have dropped at a slow pace, roughly five percent per week over the last five weeks. Gnutella searches have dropped about nine percent per week over the past eight weeks. They began dropping before the Napster searches began dropping, and Gnutella now stands at #22.
That's not to say interest in file sharing online has diminished. Searches for the phrase file sharing are still at their peak. Searches for Napster alternatives and Napster clones dropped off in early April but have rebounded somewhat. These phrases now receive about two-thirds as many queries as they did at their peak in early March.
We've noticed similar rebounds for the Gnutella versions Limewire and Bearshare. The open-source Napster clone Opennap, on the other hand, has seen interest drop precipitously. It now receives only 40 percent as many searches as it did at its March peak.
One of the more interesting Napster alternatives is the Instant Messenger piggyback software Aimster. Between the first week of March and the first week of April, Aimster searches dropped by 75 percent. But last week, Aimster searches doubled again.
Turns out the Aimster interest is less about file swapping and more about girl ogling. The face of the company is 16 year-old Aimee Deep, daughter of the software's inventor. The Aimster website recently received a renovation and is now adorned with photographs of Aimee in a slinky black dress and white string bikini.
The sexualizing of an underage girl in order to sell file sharing software does seem a bit odd, but Aimee's newfound popularity can't be denied. Last week she got more searches than a number of other beauties including Heather Locklear, Kari Wuhrer, and Laura Prepon of TV's That 70's Show. You can read more about Aimee at this Wired News article.
A new face in the world of file sharing is the program Napcameback. Napcameback didn't even exist when we did our report in February. Searches began to appear the week ending March 17, and they are up 500 percent over the past two weeks. Napcameback is a software which encrypts song names so the Napster filters cannot block them.
This also explains why searches for pig latin were huge in March, dipped in early April, and are back up again over the past two weeks. A number of Napster users had been "hiding" their files by coding the names in pig latin. Oodgay Iefgray.
All of these odd curves come together to tell a story about the last two months of the Napster controversy. Here's our guess: When the original federal court decision came down, people panicked and went looking for Napster alternatives. As March went on, it became clear that not much was being filtered from Napster, so people went back to Napster and searches for alternatives dipped.
Then Napster finally got serious about filtering -- so serious that any song with the number "4" in it, or track 4 on any CD, was being filtered out because many people were turning a song title like Janet Jackson's "All For You" into "All 4 You." When the filters got stricter, the searches for alternatives rebounded, particularly for services like Napcameback which rename files in order to fool the filters.
Napster was recently given permission to relax its filters again, so nobody knows where this roller coaster is headed next. One thing is for sure: you can always get the skinny on the latest Napster moves from our friends at Wired News, and Lycos Computers has all kinds of information on both Napster and Gnutella.
