Alex shot me a link today to the announcement of the first Xtorrent public beta. As Alex puts it, Xtorrent is designed to be the BitTorrent client that you actually want to look at and use. Fair enough. [My only issue with it is that it's Mac-only, and my present BitTorrent box is a PC. This might not be the case in six months, though, so I'm paying attention to the Mac space, wondering if Xtorrent will be the killer Mac BT app or whether it'll take Panic making something awesome. Anyway.]

My issue with switching BitTorrent clients, for me, is that I have a lot of data to manage, many of it on user-centric sites. I’m the type of BitTorrent user who makes quite sure that he supports the network significantly—for me, I seed until at least a share ratio of 3.0 on every show. Sometimes, that means I seed a show for months, waiting for enough peers that don’t already have it to grab it. Hello, Long Tail.

My current client of choice, Azureus, maintains a database that tells me how much I’ve seeded a certain show; these user-centric sites typically only do it on a macro level: how much I’ve uploaded overall, how much I’ve downloaded overall. Yes, you can get data at the session level for any particular show; but if you disconnect for any reason, then re-connect later, you won’t know how much data you’ve given out in the past on the server’s level for that particular torrent. [You might argue that this is a failure of the BitTorrent client-server model, and I probably won't disagree, but I've not read the specs closely enough to know if this is a bug or a feature, and in any regard, the standard is to handle it client-side, and clients are my concern in this entry.]

As such, I’m very client-dependent because of my BitTorrent network conscience. I think the dilemma should be obvious: without an export/import of my user data, I have significant barriers to exit and re-entry. Now, I could always declare a clean break: all new torrents downloaded after DD-Mon-YYYY will be downloaded on client Y, and installs of client X and Y will run simultaneously until client X’s torrents are well-seeded and removed from the queue. This becomes a resource issue on the client computer, however: full-featured BitTorrent clients tend to be resource hogs, so having two simultaneous clients could make things pretty sluggish. Additionally, if you throttle bandwith use as I do, you have to figure out how to set each client to throttle. All in all, an unappealing situation.

That said, despite the very nature of Azureus—it’s cross-platform and GPL‘d, things that certainly led me to choose it as a package—I’d like to not be beholden to any one client. Lock-in sucks, even when it’s free/FREE software. [Please note that the lock-in here is not anything that's necessarily endemic to the program, but rather to its use. For all I know, the data that I'm seeking to export can be fully exported. That only solves half the problem, though, as the new client would have to have the ability to import it.]

All this should explain why I’ll run Azureus until I’m ready to retire my present BitTorrent box … unless someone can solve this problem. Somehow, I doubt that I’m the only person with this issue.