A few days ago, I mentioned Microsoft’s threedegrees.com, a private P2P application for sharing content like music for the teenage crowd. Grouper, a startup from Mill Valley, CA, does it one better by providing video, as well as other features that may appeal to the over 14 crowd.

The idea is pretty simple: wouldn’t it be great to have your own private bittorrent with your family and friends for sharing stuff? Well, Grouper appears to do exactly that. You can post your family photos, videos, etc and give them access to your select group, all with the added speed and reliability of a distributed P2P.

The downside for me is no Mac support. After working for Apple in a past life, half my family use Macintosh. Om Malik reports that a Mac OS X is forthcoming in the next 3-5 months, so I’ll wait for that to come out. In the meantime, I’ll try to convice my sister to come out of the dark ages of Mac OS 8.5 so she can use it too.

Hat Tip and nice review at Om Malik.

Tom Keating has an interesting entry on Microsoft’s foray into P2P technology. It was only a matter of time before BitTorrent got Microsoft’s attention, and what I found most interesting how Microsoft is harnessing that technology with a service they run called threedegrees.com.

The first inkling I got that ThreeDegrees wasn’t designed for me was that the link for Info was called “411″. I may not be the hippest guy in our neighborhood, but they are definitely not targeting my demographic. It’s obviously for teen IM users, but I can’t tell if the website is cool to teens, or lame because it is trying to pretend to be cool.

The service is what looks like instant messaging on steroids. You sign up a few friends to create a group, and then when you are online, you can play MP3 music which is group controlled and streamed to each member. You can also send photos and “winks” (little animations) to each other.

I find it interesting enough to mention it because the same premise could be used to share video as a way to watch shows together “virtually”. I don’t believe that’s available with the Microsoft service, but it’s only a step further down the road.

In the vernacular of threedegrees.com, “click here for the lowdown.”