File and Print Sharing - technical definition
Today, file and print sharing means that Internet users can share or swap files online—Âincluding digital files having songs or photographs. Vancouver-based Ludicorp Ltd.Â’s photo-sharing and social-networking service Flickr is a Web service or Web application that assists in photo sharing. The nice feature about Flickr is that no special software has to be installed on a home computer, and it works for the Mac, Windows, and Linux. All the user needs is a Web browser. So when a digital photograph is uploaded to Flickr, it becomes part of a network that connects digital photos in a database by subject or relation to the user. Photos can be organized in many ways and shared easily with others. Furthermore, Flickr can receive digitalized photographs from a camera-featured telephone and then post the photos directly to a Weblog, or blog. The positive feature of this capability is that individuals can chat with each other online and exchange digitalized photos at the same time.
The file-sharing leader KaZaA announced in 2003 that it would extend its services by offering free telephone calls through the Internet, employing the same techniques that made the KaZaA music-sharing service hugely successful. Another file-sharing leader was Napster, Inc., which was shut down in 2001 because users contravened the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. It was reopened as a commercial file-sharing in 2004.
See Also: Internet; Network; Peer-to-Peer (P2P).