Coffeeshop – Multimedia P2P

Coffeeshop, developed in 2004, was a custom built, peer-to-peer application based on Flash and a stripped down version of Apache. Using Coffeeshop, Windows, Mac, and Linux users could stream audio or video from any location to any other.

Also unique to the system was the reliance upon social networking to organize file exchange and increase relevant search results. During extensive beta testing, it became apparent that allowing users to connect to networks of their friends provided a wealth highly relevant media to each user.

Using a web-based asynchronous Flash system, Coffeeshop offered it’s users a responsive and intuitive interface which was developed in just a few months. By using an intelligent index-caching system, search queries were executed in a fraction of a second, despite an index size of hundreds of thousands of files.

Coffeeshop was an independent project of Vestal Designer Jeffrey Warren and software developer Patrick Fitzsimmons.