Wirehog was a P2P application working with thefacebook.com, the old version of Facebook, which was at the time a social media website for about 250 colleges and universities. Wirehog and thefacebook.com were created by Mark Zuckerberg, Andrew K. McCollum, and Adam D’Angelo.
Wirehog allowed Facebook users to trade files with one another, like users traded files with P2P programs like Kazaa, LimeWire, and Grokster.
In an interview with TechNewsWorld, Mark Zuckerberg said:
Programs like Kazaa emphasize searching. You want a file and you search everyone’s computer on the P2P network to find it. “There’s no searching involved with Wirehog. It’s about sharing interesting personal files with your friends. A lot of people have tried to do social networking with file-sharing applications. One reason why ours is perhaps more exciting is because our users don’t need to develop their own social networks around this. You don’t need to add people as friends when you get on to Wirehog because of the integration with Facebook.”
The Wirehog application operated atop Facebook. It remained in existence until early 2006. Though the P2P file sharing system was brought into play when thefacebook.com reached about 500,000 users, and was once slated to become a main aspect of the site, it was shut down over concerns of legal consequences of copyright infringement.
