

File sharing doesn't have to be about indiscriminate trading with anonymous strangers.

LimeWire served up a major upgrade to its file sharing client Wednesday with a simpler interface and powerful private sharing features.

Using the new version, you could potentially share music with your friends, download NSFW videos from wherever and share photos with your family — all without anyone being the wiser.

This may sound risky, but

LimeWire's new sharing features allow a level of control over what you're sharing with whom that makes it a feasible scenario. You can still use it just like the old version, to share and download from strangers, but the socially networked sharing feature could become the main way many people use the program.

The alpha version of LimeWire was made public for Windows, Mac and Linux on Wednesday at around noon. The program installs easily, importing files from your library and letting you search and download music, video, images, documents and other files from the gnutella P2P network. It can also act as your bit torrent client. But the main improvement here is the way it lets you set up easy, private file sharing networks on a file-by-file, user-by-user basis.

"I have a

65-year-old mother in Scotland, and the idea of asking her to sign up with Snapfish and to log in, and the upload process, it's still a very complicated thing for ordinary people," said LimeWire COO Kevin Bradshaw when he first told us of the plan. "Imagine a situation where she would have an installation of LimeWire ... I could just drop pictures into a folder on my hard drive and they would automatically appear on her drive."

Indeed, the free private sharing feature (instructions below) is the strongest selling point of the new LimeWire. But you can also use it as before to download stuff from strangers and share content with the gnutella network at large. But in it's default mode, LimeWire is only set to share files you downloaded from the network; all other content in the library must be intentionally shared, either with specific users or the network in general.

Here's how it works. The first thing you'll notice after you upgrade is the new, super clean interface. If you can't figure out how to search for files with this interface, you might want to get yourself checked. Note: some of these screenshots are of the private alpha version.

The search results start rolling in. As with the previous version, each search query spawns a new tab:

Double-clicking on a search result brings up the download screen. LimeWire can automatically import all downloaded music into your iTunes library:

[ ](/images_blogs/photos/uncategorized/2008/12/10/downloading.jpg)Now we get to this new private sharing feature. After you enter your Gmail user name and password (or other Jabber log-in), your friends show up in a list to the left. LimeWire product manager said they're working to add the ability to import friends from Facebook and other sites. Friends who are online appear in a chat window so you can ask them to download and install it. Once they do, you'll be able to decide which files to share with them and view the files they're sharing with you. Names of friends have been obscured (in other examples, we cropped them out):

Again, in LimeWire's default setting, only files downloaded from LimeWire are shared, as opposed to most other file sharing clients, which share everything in your library by default. However, you can activate network-wide sharing for files by clicking the Share link next to each one or by right-clicking multiple files. Note that files can be unshared at any time:

The other way to share files in the new LimeWire is to choose a specific person in your friend list and then designate files or entire file types to be shared with them. You can do this for music, videos, images, documents, programs and other file types:

LimeWire product manager Nathan Lovejoy told us that the company intentionally left out a way to add friends from the community at large to your friend list, as one could with the original Napster (although you can download whatever they're sharing publicly).

That way, he said, people really have to know those they're sharing with. Not only does this discourage RIAA snoops, but it should also result in a more personal experience when using the software, because people will actually have to know their friends. What a concept!

In addition to file-by-file private sharing, the other main way to share files with a friend is to share all of a certain type of media — audio, video, documents and/or images. To do this, you select the media type in your library and then hit the share button. In this case, I'm going to share all of my audio files with a specific friend. This feature could work great for sharing all your photos with family, while keeping your music and videos to yourself:

Then you enter the friend's name:

Click on any of your friends to see what they're sharing with you, categorized by file type:

The LimeWire music store is available within the application, so you can purchase MP3s for $1 a piece, or cheaper if you buy in bulk:

The LimeWire alpha version is already relatively stable, and already offers a solid way for users to move beyond vanilla file sharing towards a personalized social media network for friends and family. Whenever you share files on a file sharing network (with a few exceptions), you expose your IP address to other users of the network, which is how the RIAA picks people to sue. LimeWire's simple-to-use private sharing features will help file sharers avoid legal scrutiny, but they also represent a substantial, non-infringing use for the program that will be of great benefit to users. And you can forget about the file size limitations of e-mail, online file-sending services and the like. LimeWire lets you share files of any size for free, because it transfers content directly from computer to computer.

You can download the new LimeWire as of Wednesday. Lovejoy tells us that the beta version should be ready in a couple of weeks.

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