I have no idea where you got this information from
Sphere only supports its own protocol, and http for hosting own website. Sphere features service sharing, which means other services you offer besides files you can share. As i stated somewhere, in an interview i believe. We described this service in full.
www.ratiatum.com i think
Service sharing allows you to advertise these services, letting other users know your running them. If you run an IRC, Opennap or FTP server you can share it with the users of Sphere. They can then search for these services by keywords, when found lauch a defualt (set in options) client to launch to connect to that service. If you want to use a web service then Sphere will launch IE or netscape to connect to that service. If you want to use an IRC service, sphere will launch say mIRC or bitchx to connect.
hope this helps
Regards,
Mick W.