Collaborating and sharing your know-how online

Kazaa Media Desktop
http://www.kazaa.com
= interesting, promising

Kazaa can be considered a media and content sharing community, where members can share their files (audio, video, images and documents) online.
In fact, Kazaa is the most popular of P2P tools downloaded by over 230 million users as of May 2003 (Download.com statistics).

Among Kazaa's advanced features there is a media management facility to easily organize your growing file collection of downloads as well as a music playlist creation area and a facility to monitor download and upload traffic.

Also, Kazaa offers an embedded Microsoft Media Player for audio and video playback and instant messaging.

You can customize your Kazaa interface with different skins.

The program automatically resumes interrupted downloads and it automatically searches on its network of users for other sources of the same content.

The good thing about Kazaa is that it downloads one file from multiple users simultaneously. So basically you are taking little chunks from a bunch of people. This is good for you because you get the maximum download rate and it is a great boon when you are the one sharing because you are not being taken all of your bandwith at once.

The interface appears to be very straightforward and feels easy to use.
However, there is some evidence that the interface in fact does not support users well enough in maintaining an overview of which folders and files they are actually sharing with other users. This might lead to privacy risks for users. (Read more about Kazaa and privacy problems and risks.)

Kazaa constantly displays advertising banners, which take up connection bandwidth. The advertising banners are displaying targeted ads that are created on the information that third party software programs, which are installed automatically together with Kazaa, gather about your browsing preferences.

Robin Good's Mini-Guide "Free P2P File Sharing Without Spyware" tells you how you can get rid of these third-party programs and gives you an overview of safe and free alternatives to Kazaa. Read more about this Mini-Guide.