Visitors to the eDonkey website may have been surprised to find a note on the homepage stating that a new version was currently being tested for release sometime next week. The eDonkey network has been holding strong even after the release of the serverless Overnet that was thought would replace it.

The note on the website reads

We have a new version of the donkey currently in testing by a small number of users. We should have a public release of it sometime next week.

This is great news and may be the catalyst to launch this network into a different league. The network statistics for eDonkey have been strong with over 400,000 users at any given time. We recorded over half a million users (545,271) on the network on January 2.

Meanwhile, Overnet seems to be losing some of it's steam. It had a range of 115,000 - 122,000 according to our statistics from December 31 through January 4. But has not reached 100,000 since January 5.

Introducing a new version of the donkey has the potential to disrupt the current trend that has been occuring on the network: a mass migration from the original eDonkey client to the Open-Source eMule client. The eMule client connects to the same network as eDonkey and has many versions of it out that are modified. Perhaps with some major enhancements to the client in the new version, eDonkey can shift the migration although it is still unclear what improvements have been made.

With strong numbers and massive resources eDonkey isn't going to be replaced by Overnet in the near future. We look forward to this new version and all the potential it has.

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P2P Clients :: eDonkey

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