LittleShoot is a new peer to peer application from the makers of LimeWire. But unlike LimeWire and most other P2P file sharing applications, LittleShoot is browser-based. You can search for audio or video files, images, documents, or applications in your browser. And using the built in media player, you can even stream audio and video from the LittleShoot application without waiting for downloads to complete.

You do need to install a 22MB browser plugin, and LittleShoot does eat a fair amount of RAM (over 100MB during my testing). But there are a few advantages to a browser based P2P application. First, you can search LimeWire, LittleShoot, and other sources including YouTube Flickr from a single search box. And second, if you have a web browser open most of the time anyway, it's nice to be able to search for files without launching a separate application.

Because LittleShoot uses peer to peer technology, files are downloaded from multiple computers at once. And the service tries to optimize your download speed by prioritizing sources that are geographically closest to you and sources that are using the same ISP as you.

You can also "publish" files on your desktop to the Little Shoot network with just a few clicks. Just select any files on your computer that you want to share and other users will be able to start streaming or downloading them right from your computer. Once a few other users have the files on their computers they'll share the burden of serving the files to other users who want to download them.

[via Mashable]