This seems very interesting, but I have no idea what to make of it yet. I think it has a lot of potential, but it doesn't give any incentive to switching over because of the relatively low rate of people actually getting caught and the ubiquity of closed group torrent sites already out there. This seems significant because it's potentially a way to monetize torrents.
Copypasta from the main isohunt.com site. It's their new project.
Copypasta from the main isohunt.com site. It's their new project.
Quote: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.
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.
