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April 19, 2006
On Beyond Napster: The Future of P2P
For all the hype of its early days, peer-to-peer networks (P2P) have seemingly stalled at file-sharing. I'm a congential contrarian, of course, so I have been unable to stop myself lately from looking closely at some stealthy companies doing interesting next-generation P2P work. With that in mind, it is timely to see this IEEE Distributed Systems article about where P2P goes from here, both practically and the underlying research.....the ultimate test for P2P's success will be its ability to support applications of commercial value over the network. Establishing marketplaces and auctions in a P2P setting would create the equivalent of today's Amazon and eBay without the negatives associated with centralization.
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Related to this, European Union is funding a major Open Source project to utilize P2P in cross-company collaboration with business applications.
http://bergie.iki.fi/blog/digital-business-ecosystem-in-fisl.html
Better have a look at http://www.groove.net how Microsoft is going to use p2p in its future commercial applications.
I truly believe that for P2P to go mainstream (beyond Napster type apps), it has to stop creating private silos or darknets and instead embrace the traditional web and allow interesting riffs and mash-ups- in effect blurring the boundaries between the desktop and the web.
BlueBox (http://www.blueboxnow.com) is one such application and I'm sure there will be many more...