Wirehog
   HOME

TheInfoList



OR:

Wirehog was a friend-to-friend
file sharing File sharing is the practice of distributing or providing access to digital media, such as computer programs, multimedia (audio, images and video), documents or electronic books. Common methods of storage, transmission and dispersion include ...
program that was linked to
Facebook Facebook is a social media and social networking service owned by the American technology conglomerate Meta Platforms, Meta. Created in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with four other Harvard College students and roommates, Eduardo Saverin, Andre ...
and allowed people to transfer files directly between computers.


History

Wirehog was created by
Andrew McCollum Andrew McCollum (born September 4, 1983) is an American angel investor and businessman. He is a co-founder of Facebook and the current chief executive officer of Philo. Education McCollum attended Harvard University with co-founder Mark Zucker ...
,
Mark Zuckerberg Mark Elliot Zuckerberg (; born May 14, 1984) is an American businessman who co-founded the social media service Facebook and its parent company Meta Platforms, of which he is the chairman, chief executive officer, and controlling sharehold ...
,
Adam D'Angelo Adam D'Angelo (born August 14, 1984) is an American internet entrepreneur. He is best known for his role as the co-founder and CEO of Quora, based in Mountain View, California, and as the first Chief Technology Officer of Facebook (now Meta). ...
, and Sean Parker during their development of the
Facebook Facebook is a social media and social networking service owned by the American technology conglomerate Meta Platforms, Meta. Created in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with four other Harvard College students and roommates, Eduardo Saverin, Andre ...
social networking website in
Palo Alto Palo Alto ( ; Spanish language, Spanish for ) is a charter city in northwestern Santa Clara County, California, United States, in the San Francisco Bay Area, named after a Sequoia sempervirens, coastal redwood tree known as El Palo Alto. Th ...
in the summer and fall of 2004. The only way to join Wirehog was through an invitation from a member and although it was originally planned as an integrated feature of Facebook, it could also be used by friends who were not registered on Facebook. Wirehog was launched in October 2004, and taken down in January 2006. Its target audience at the time was the same as the campus-only file-sharing service i2hub that had launched earlier that year. i2hub was gaining a lot of traction and growing rapidly. In an interview with ''
The Harvard Crimson ''The Harvard Crimson'' is the student newspaper at Harvard University, an Ivy League university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. The newspaper was founded in 1873, and is run entirely by Harvard College undergraduate students. His ...
'', Zuckerberg said, "I think Wirehog will probably spread in the same way that thefacebook did." During an early investing pitch to notable early Facebook
seed round Seed money, also known as seed funding or seed capital, is a form of securities offering in which an investor puts capital in a startup company in exchange for an equity stake or convertible note stake in the company. The term ''seed'' suggest ...
investors,
Peter Thiel Peter Andreas Thiel (; born 11 October 1967) is an American entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and political activist. A co-founder of PayPal, Palantir Technologies, and Founders Fund, he was the first outside investor in Facebook. According ...
and Reid Hoffman in 2004, Hoffman told Zuckerberg to "abandon Wirehog" in favor of "thefacebook" project. The software was described by its creators as "an HTTP file transfer system using dynamic DNS and NAT traversal to make your personal computer addressable, routable and easily accessible". The client allowed users to both access data stored on their home computer from a remote location and let friends exchange files between each other's computers. In ways, Wirehog was a project comparable to Alex Pankratov's Hamachi VPN, the
open-source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use and view the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open source model is a decentrali ...
OneSwarm
private network In Internet networking, a private network is a computer network that uses a private address space of IP addresses. These addresses are commonly used for local area networks (LANs) in residential, office, and enterprise environments. Both the IPv ...
, or the darknet RetroShare software. Until at least July 2005, Facebook officially endorsed the p2p client, saying on their website:
"Wirehog is a social application that lets friends exchange files of any type with each other over the web. Facebook and Wirehog are integrated so that Wirehog knows who your friends are in order to make sure that only people in your network can see your files. Facebook certifies that it is okay to enter your facebook email address and password into Wirehog for the purposes of this integration."
The Wirehog software was written in Python and was available for
Microsoft Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...
and
Mac OS X macOS, previously OS X and originally Mac OS X, is a Unix, Unix-based operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple since 2001. It is the current operating system for Apple's Mac (computer), Mac computers. With ...
only. A
Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...
version had been promised on the service's website. The service ran a custom-written HTTP server, and file downloading and photo viewing was through the web browser, with requested authentication by Wirehog's central servers to allow users to set up custom privacy settings.


See also

* Friend-to-friend * Private P2P *
Virtual private network Virtual private network (VPN) is a network architecture for virtually extending a private network (i.e. any computer network which is not the public Internet) across one or multiple other networks which are either untrusted (as they are not con ...


References


External links


Wirehog
defunct

- TechNewsWorld article
History of Wirehog
- Harvard Crimson {{Facebook navbox File sharing networks Meta Platforms applications Internet properties established in 2004