Announcing Hexagon.cc, a Social File Sharing site

Posted: Thu Sep 03, 2009 1:11 am

With a short review at Torrentfreak and a mention in my interview with BBC, I'm excited to finally announcing a public preview of our spinoff project Hexagon.cc ! We have spent 2 years developing this, and I assure you this will change the way you think of a BitTorrent site and file sharing.

How is Hexagon different? The biggest conceptual change is everything is shared within groups you can join and create yourself. These groups can be public, based on interests or made by independent bands, film makers, game studios, etc. for promotional purposes. They can also be made private, so you can very easily and comfortably invite your friends to a private group for sharing your private videos and such. You can do this on Youtube and similar sites, but with BitTorrent, you can share any type of file and not only video, and there's no restriction on file format or size (as much as you can seed). In Hexagon groups, you can also share both torrents as well as flash videos so you get the best of both worlds. This blend of BT and flash video sharing is an unique first.

Another big feature of Hexagon is organization. We've seen through the rise of sharing on BitTorrent, volume of spam rises with its popularity. We've addressed this on isoHunt with comments and rating powered by you, but on Hexagon we've taken organization and spam control to a whole new level technically. Hexagon is (currently) invite only, so if a spammer gets in somehow and start inviting other spammers and creating other accounts, we can chain ban such with relative ease. Hexagon have also taken a very sophisticated approach to files organization. Besides tags now commonly found on many sites, Hexagon did away with the traditional "Videos", "Audio", etc. general categorization and instead, you can label or link your torrent posts with Semantic Web resources. For example, a firefox 3.5 torrent should associate to the Firefox resource, and under the Firefox resource you can easily browse all torrents in association for different versions of Firefox. This is a definite first for any social media site, and goes a long way in organizing the huge volume of torrents being shared.

Hexagon.cc is currently open for more users to stress test the system. We would very much appreciate your feedback as we continue to add new features and improve the site! But first, Digg this and Reddit this before

Sign up with this limited invitation: ~~http://lobby.hexagon.cc/invitations/0UAUYvncEt~~ http://lobby.hexagon.cc/invitations/kLVGYtaQmG <- (new invites available now at new link)

Read on if you want to see more details on the design, features and future direction of Hexagon.

Posted: Thu Sep 03, 2009 1:14 am

Groups, groups, groups

The main difference that set Hexagon.cc apart from other social file sharing and BitTorrent sites, is everything is centered around groups. Be it file sharing networks or flash video sites, a key piece we found missing is social context. For example, lets say you are an university student. Your prof shares video lectures and other course material with you, within a group he easily created for your Psychology course. Another larger group is created for your university, for more broad and general file sharing between students. You make a private group for your band buddies, for sharing music and videos of your jamming sessions. And you are subscribed as fans to groups of your favorite artists and episodic video shorts. While your mom can be subscribed to a cooking group with weekly cooking videos.

In today's Flash videos and BitTorrent sites, much of this sharing would either be disorganized or not happen at all, because there is no social context or privacy to encourage many modes of sharing. And each group are self contained sites under the Hexagon network of groups, with sharing of torrents, videos, discussions separate from other groups but searchable across the network, and moderatorship granted by respective group owners.

Public, Private and (soon) Commercial sharing

As touched on above, groups can be created with fine grain permission controls to be either public or private. Public groups are listed in a searchable directory for all to join, while private groups does not exist for all intents and purposes to non-members, are invite-only and is SSL encrypted.

P2P serves an important purpose for open and unhindered sharing, even in countries with oppressive censorship. SSL encrypted groups with strong privacy features and plausible deniability ensure private sharing stay truely private.

The permissions system in enforcing who is allowed into your groups, also helps the problem with spam that is rampant on social media sites, be it BitTorrent or flash videos. WIth tight moderation and anti-spam tools, we can ensure high signal to noise ratio in what's shared.

Our groups system will also allow commercial content to be shared, with monetization opportunities for copyright holders via compensation models such as direct "fan" contribution or our sharing of advertising revenue. We have contacts with game publishers and independent musicians and film makers, who are very interested in creating their own groups where they can directly market their music, videos or games and interact with their fans, and generate sales directly or indirectly. Collaboration with content owners in the P2P context is no stranger to us, with our experience on isoHunt.com spotlighting independent art and for example our sponsorship with Awesome New Republic (see http://torrentfreak.com/record-label-sponsors-bittorrent-site-isohunt-090503/). We are working towards more features for commercial content owners in our next phase of Hexagon.cc after this public preview.

Creative Commons

TLD of Hexagon.cc is punning for Creative Commons. The legal context in which people share online is changing, and we want to encourage the future of file sharing under CC licensing wherever possible, of content like home videos, game trailers and music. Mashups and appropriation art is losing under restrictive, default copyright and the only way to reduce rampant "failed sharing" of content like home videos and independent art that ought to be permissive is to streamline the selection of CC licensing during the sharing process.

To kick-start this, we have imported over 40,000 Creative Commons music torrents from Jamendo.com. We hope that with more people aware of CC and choosing to share their content using it, much wider sharing and re-mixing using BitTorrent distribution will happen under permissive licensing, following footsteps of Open Source software which had been the driving force behind adoption of the BitTorrent protocol.

Bridging gap between P2P and mainstream flash videos

Social media encompass sharing that is happening on both P2P networks and mainstream flash video sites like Youtube. We have created a sharing system for Hexagon groups, where people can share flash videos as easily as torrents and discussions. You simply post a link to a video on supported sites which include namely Youtube and Vimeo, and all the metadata (title, description, tags) of the video is imported with the embeded video, similar to the rich metadata available in torrents (see below).

Semantic Web resources to organize shared files

A major problem after studying current flash videos and BitTorrent sites, is it's difficult to search and even more difficult to browse what you are looking for or interested in. For example, with torrent files, we've seen Gentoo Linux ISOs torrented without including "gentoo" in the filenames inside the torrent files, but only named by year and version of the distribution. This orphans content from the "resource" of what you are looking for (Gentoo Linux in this case).

A key piece of our navigation and UI in curing this problem is easy association with Semantic Web resources in posting of torrent files. We are currently using Freebase's API as a resources aggregator. So with the Gentoo Linux example, when a user upload a torrent file without "gentoo" in the torrent file, the Gentoo Linux SemWeb resource is conveniently suggested when you type that in title of torrent file you are posting. You can use a title as descriptive as you like, and it will be linked to the same resource that can be shared in browsing under the Gentoo Linux resource for any other torrents of different versions of Gentoo Linux.

This in essence becomes an ad-hoc and expansive directory system with highly relevant association to what people would be searching and browsing for, bringing much more order to the chaos in user generated content sites. This kind of resource grouping of shared content will also allow grouped similarity between user interests, so interest based recommendation of new content based on resources will be possible.

Posted: Thu Sep 03, 2009 7:54 am

hexagon is AWESOME Cool

Posted: Thu Sep 03, 2009 8:39 am

Haha! im just sitting here watching the membership go up and up and up Cool

EDIT

Invitations not working? Check this link then:

http://lobby.hexagon.cc/invitations/g5XMY663tJ

Posted: Thu Sep 03, 2009 11:07 am

I hope Hexagon will do great Smile

And nice to see you again HBS Smile

Posted: Thu Sep 03, 2009 11:35 am

HBS wrote:

Haha! im just sitting here watching the membership go up and up and up Cool

I'm trying to keep up with it without ignoring mrs.djdezzie! (So far so good) Congrats again guys! Very Happy

Posted: Thu Sep 03, 2009 6:30 pm

Hope it takes off.

Posted: Fri Sep 04, 2009 12:04 pm

so far i'm very impressed! i really hope it's well received. it seems to have the potential to be something great, much like the community at oink's. going to spread the word to my music nerd buddies. hehe

Posted: Fri Sep 04, 2009 12:26 pm

I am in control of 2 groups. A lot of members joined yesterday and because Hexagon is catgcorized into groups it is so much easier to catch the dodgy ones! Laughing

It is running very very well! Very Happy

Posted: Fri Sep 04, 2009 2:06 pm

djdezzie wrote:

I am in control of 2 groups. A lot of members joined yesterday and because Hexagon is catgcorized into groups it is so much easier to catch the dodgy ones! Laughing

It is running very very well! Very Happy

Excellent djdezzie Very Happy

Watching Hexagon grow from beta to now has been a learning experience for me and it's a great place to be! Thanks to IH and all who were and are involved Very Happy

Posted: Fri Sep 04, 2009 5:12 pm

The site is really going well just look at the numbers thanks again IH Wink

Posted: Sat Sep 05, 2009 12:25 am

patcito wrote:

hexagon is AWESOME Cool

So it seams. Laughing

http://awesome.hexagon.cc/

Congrats IH, patcito, rubyruy, somazx, and everybody else I can remember the user names of it seem to be going great.

Posted: Sat Sep 05, 2009 10:31 pm

Well the Hexagon site appears to be invite-only, so I can't really comment on it.

Anyone want to PM me an invite?

I do have one comment: the front page of the web site is broken if people are using a larger font size (text and fields all overlapping and unreadable).

Posted: Sat Sep 05, 2009 10:38 pm

It was invite only. It has now gone public. You are free to join.

Posted: Sat Sep 05, 2009 11:20 pm

WhiteViper wrote:

It was invite only. It has now gone public. You are free to join.

Invitation code
* This field is required.

It is still invite-only. :-/