Russ Beattie pointed this week to a new private social software/file-sharing tool called  CleverCactus Share. It uses an invite method of user registration only allowing your friends to access your files.

As explained by its author:

This is P2P, yes, but it's not Kazaa, or Gnutella, or anything else that's out there for that matter, although the ideas have been surfacing recently. Don, for example, a few days ago talked about the pros and cons of P2P NG/Darknets, concepts with which share has some similarities.

P2P connections in share are secure and fully peer to peer. This is P2P like the Internet was at the beginning. There are no proxies involved, not even proxies within the P2P network. We only provide authentication and, if necessary, handshaking between clients. That is nice, but it creates a problem as far as connecting through some types of firewalls, and we'll be working on improving it over the next days and weeks.

This is why I was recently talking about sociable software that is useful for something more than browsing contact lists, and that allows us to use our network as a complement, rather than a replacement, of the real world, while maintaining privacy and expressing relationships properly.