The sharing and tracking of torrents through Twitter just got a little easier with today’s release of BitTorrent’s Torrent Tweet, an app that you can add to torrent client uTorrent in order to organize the discussions surrounding individual torrents on Twitter. Through Torrent Tweet, tweets are published with an automatically generated hashtag unique to each torrent file, like this one.
From BitTorrent VP Simon Morris:
“The point of Torrent Tweet is to adapt the powerful referencing system built into BitTorrent to the incredible social interaction engine that Twitter has built such that people can have conversations about things they are downloading, and they can be sure that they are talking about the same thing.”
Morris also hopes that other torrent sites will follow suit and adopt the shortened #bt hashtag convention. However his ambition to centralize all torrenting discussion through Twitter is counter-intuitive. Because it is currently illegal to duplicate and share copyrighted content, file sharers doing so risk becoming the targets of Hurt Locker-esque lawsuits. The savvier ones usually cloak their activities in at least some semblance of anonymity which Twitter lacks, as users are tied to an account.
Despite this risk, torrenting activity on Twitter shows no signs of ceasing. Twitter search “Mad + Men + torrent+ S4 + Ep3″ shortly after 7pm PDT on Sunday and be amazed at how quickly people post torrent files. Or just search for “Arcade+Fire+the+ Suburbs + torrent” right now. The launch of a Twitter-specific torrent indexing system only further reinforces the fact that Twitter has now become a powerful locus for file-sharing.
