Peer to peer file sharing is, potentially, a great way to let friends and colleagues access information on your system, but the popular networks are really geared up for an ‘all or nothing’ approach, and don’t give you much control over who accesses files on your system – hardly a recipe for security.

Microsoft’s Foldershare is one alternative, but its interface is a bit clunky, and you have to share whole folders with people.

Onshare, from the people behind the Onspeed internet accelerator, is designed to let you share files easily, with security in mind. Connections between peers are encrypted, it works fine behind firewalls, and the only people who can access your files are friends to whom you’ve given permission.

Those are granular; you can share some files in a folder with one user, and others with someone else, so there’s much less chance of accidentally sharing private material. You can also chat, instant messenger style, and include files in your messages.

It works, but we found it a little quirky; to be fair, it is beta software, but the interface takes some getting used to. The search box under Friends can’t be used to find new contacts, for example, only to search your existing list. If you click on someone to browse their files an Explorer window opens, but to search you get an Onshare window, which displays nothing until you click Find, unlike the search in your Friends list.

More annoyingly, sometimes the service didn’t work. Dragging and dropping a remote file produced a message that there was insufficient bandwidth top copy it, but double clicking to open it was fine. You can also only open or copy files, meaning you can’t drop a file in someone else’s folder; you have to share it from your computer instead.

If these quirks are ironed out when it comes out of beta testing, Onshare certainly has the potential to succeed, without the security issues of other peer-to-peer software.