If you’ve ever wanted to share a file with Facebook friends, you’ve likely heard of Pipe. Pipe is a Facebook app that makes file sharing easy – just pick a friend, drop a file into the Pipe and the friend will receive it immediately. It’s easy, secure and delivers on the promise of real-time communications over the Web.
Pipe recently rebuilt its app to use WebRTC instead of Flash for peer-to-peer content delivery and file transfer. Users can transfer up to 1GB-files in real-time or store 250MB-files for three days in a secure locker service if users are offline.
“We love technology, but above all else we’ve been working to make keep things simple and intuitive, hiding it in the background. Pipe simply works. But for those of you who share our passion for technology or are just curious, we’ve used the very latest peer-to-peer (P2P) communication protocol based on WebRTC and switched the technology platform from Adobe Flash to JavaScript. In other words, we’ve used new technology to build a really simple app that everyone can use, everyday,” the company’s blog post reads.
Simon Hossell, CEO of Pipe, explained that using Adobe technology only worked nine times out of 10 due to conflicts such as firewalls. Flash has just about dominated the video plug-in market for the last few years, until competition arrived from Apple and HTML5. Adobe responded with support for HTML5, but the future of video online is with WebRTC. It lives right in the browser and offers the same interactive and collaborative features as Flash – peer-to-peer connectivity, VoIP, screen sharing and audio and video streaming – without the hassle of downloading or installing anything. There are still some details to work out as WebRTC develops, but the number of companies using WebRTC in applications or solutions is steadily growing.
The newest version of Pipe will only work for users with a WebRTC-compatible browser, which is Chrome, Firefox or Opera at the moment. For those not using one of those browsers, Pipe can fall back on its other transfer methods.
Edited by
Cassandra Tucker
