Allpeers is a revolutionary "BitTorrent powered" Firefox extension that makes it easy to share pictures, music, videos, and web pages with friends from within Firefox itself. The latest addition to the extension is a completely encrypted instant messenger.

The new chat feature that AllPeers has implemented ensures full privacy, a functionality that most other instant messengers lack. Besides this, it is of course very useful to be able to chat about the files you’re sharing with your friends.

You can see the new chat feature, and many of the other great features in this excellent video tutorial AllPeers published earlier today.

AllPeers is not meant to replace traditional BitTorrent clients at this point. It doesn’t have a user interface to download .torrent files, and there are no bandwidth management, or other advanced configuration options available. Matthew Gertner, Chief Technology Officer at Allpeers told TorrentFreak earlier this year that those features will probably be implemented in the 1.0 release.

Many BitTorrent users like the idea of a BitTorrent extension for Firefox, but would prefer a “lite version”. When we asked Matt if they had considered releasing a lite version of AllPeers, without the social stuff, he said: “We haven’t made a decision about this but I certainly wouldn’t rule it out. In any case, we’re planning to open source AllPeers later this year, so I assume someone could do this themselves afterwards.”