How Businesses Can Use P2P - Page 2

Written by Kirill Pertsev / February 4, 2009 6:25 PM / 4 Comments

P2P as a Social Tool

The traditional Internet (Web 1.0) was built mostly like a television network. Websites were controlled by a small group of content producers (editors, media teams, individual owners, etc.), and millions of users were consumers of that content. The barrier to entry was far lower than it was in the television industry, but it was still mainly a one-way road from the website to the user. The Internet's infrastructure reflected this: data centers, thick pipes that connected them, and subscriber lines that could download much faster than upload.

Then Web 2.0 came along, and everything started to change. Today, most popular sites were created by ordinary users who care less about owning content than about sharing it with others. Developers created ecosystems and gave users tools to track each other and exchange content, and sites became service providers instead of content sources.

What happened to the Internet's infrastructure, then? Nothing. Imagine YouTube going out of business: the entire infrastructure for that video would disappear in a day, but the videos themselves would still exist, scattered among computers of individual users, stuck on cell phones, caught in caches, etc.

Now take that one step further: instead of YouTube, we have a P2P network, full of videos and convenient tools to watch and upload them. Nobody can close this network or put it out of business. Sufficiently large P2P networks are invincible; if you don't believe that, ask the MPAA and RIAA.

Web 2.0 is P2P (in a social sense), done with Web 1.0 tools and old infrastructure. To unlock a box with a whole set of new services, we need to upgrade the infrastructure. Just as Gopher was replaced by WWW, and UUCP was replaced by SMTP, the current star-shaped web infrastructure will be replaced by a mesh-shaped cloud network. Data centers would still exist, but instead of providing bandwidth and servers, they would provide reliability and accessibility. (And a system of measurement would need to be established for both.)

We can call this a "social Internet infrastructure": an infrastructure that reflects new social behavior, that allows anyone to connect and share content with anyone else, while still enjoying sufficient privacy and security. It's not so much a revolution as an evolution: another step in a process that has been occuring for some time already. It happened to the telephone system -- does anyone remember having to call a phone station to be put through to another person? I've only read about it in books. It will happen to the Internet eventually, too.

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I am convinced that P2P could be "Synonymous" with cloud storage. But going from cloud storage to cloud computing would be difficult (if not impossible).

In addition, a bad image has been created around P2P - that "illegal" thing. How do you change people's perception about something so negative?

Posted by: DJ | February 4, 2009 9:40 PM

"Uploading information to Google Docs to share it with colleagues is not P2P" - Yep with you there...

"but sending the same information as an attachment to email is" Huh? What?

I suppose you did say that you are trying to redefine the term?

I prefer the old "inaccurate" [sic] definition of P2P where at some point there is direct communications between the Peers. And this never happens with email.

Yes there may be servers involved, but these provide directory type services. They tell you where to find a peer and give you some information about the peer. They might even help you establish initial communication between peers, but then they get out of the way.

My advice, sleep off the Web 2.0 Kool-Aid and try to think about the subject in a broader sense. With metered access about to make a come-back you cant continue to ignore that P2P shifts the bandwidth costs from the publisher to the user. And think also about what shifting the applications from specialised, energy efficient data centre hardware to much less efficient, generic PC means. The incremental costs to each end user may or may not be significant. But add up all of those PCs with power supplies 5-10% less efficient, with card readers, high end graphics and other peripherals servers don't have or need; and you do have the potential for significant environmental impact.

Posted by: Allen | February 4, 2009 11:39 PM

#1 In addition, a bad image has been created around P2P - that "illegal" thing. How do you change people's perception about something so negative?

Depends on who are those 'people'. People were watching Beijing Olympic Games using p2p plugin. Did they know that they're using p2p? I bet no. Selling p2p-based technology to enterprises is different, but those companies which actually care is it p2p or not are the companies which understand benefits of p2p. And companies which just buy 'remote access solution' don't care is it p2p or not. They're buying a product, not a technology.

#2 I prefer the old "inaccurate" [sic] definition of P2P where at some point there is direct communications between the Peers.

How do you know? All sufficiently mature p2p technologies establish a relayed communication when they can't connect both peers directly. It's completely transparent to the user, and sometimes even to the developer. Sometimes these relays are provided by the vendor, sometimes (as with Skype) they're being chosen from the peers.

Posted by: Kirill Pertsev | February 5, 2009 6:56 PM

With metered access about to make a come-back you cant continue to ignore that P2P shifts the bandwidth costs from the publisher to the user. mIRC

Posted by: muhabbet | February 8, 2009 7:12 AM

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