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FYI, O'Reilly recently had a big P2P conference in San Francisco, you can find out lots more information on P2P, especially on who all the current playing in the market are and what they are making, here.

While we're waiting for the article to come back, take a look at this site about p2p, this article with statistics on gnutella and links, and of course this list of p2p clients. There might be some interesting things in this slashdot article. And yes I am a filthy karma whore, and no I have no shame whatsoever.

In your micropayment article at OpenP2P you praise the flat rate subscription model as a better solution than micropayments for services. How does this translate to Microsoft's .NET strategy of software as a service, and SUN microsystem's simmilar announcemnt. How does user territoriality (of their PC) and business logic factor in? people subscribe to content, but will they subscribe to products? Are there unseen economic factors that will kick in?

In your article "The Case Against Micropayments" you state the case against micropayments. Has anything in the intervening time changed your mind (i.e. the collapse of content), or do you believe that the fundamentals of micropayments are impossible to achieve? Does your problem with micropayments stem primarily with pay-per-view, or rather the concept of mandatorily user supported sites (i.e. extrapolating micropayments to include subscriptions or content packs)?

yafla!

I agree this is a problem, but I disagree that it's a fatal flaw. People could, for example set up local automated scripts(or download bots from TUCOWS) to take care of the pop ups behind the scenes (e.g. they authorize sites X Y and Z automatically). They still have to deal with new sites, but there are still schemes yet to be discovered to deal with these situations with a minimal amount of hassle.

Don't you think that would be highly annoying? I doubt techincally illiterate people will be willing to do this. So, maybe it'll get integrated into MSIE 7. But just like with cookies, the default will probably be "Yes, to everything", and that leaves annoying pop-up window attacks still possible (also, consider the attack of hidden frames: have half the website devoted to frames that look like background, yet charge the user seperately. This is less obivous than popping up windows all over the place.)

And let's look at what we get in return, quality websites. The days of great sites like this arrising from ad revenue are numbered.

This is probably true. Ads are clearly not the way to make money on the internet. They don't work, as Jakob Neilsein is fond of pointing out. I'm just saying that micropayments, at least in their current form are also not the way to do it. Personally, I don't mind this. There are very few "content" sites that I actually like. Salon.com is about the only one. The rest...well, I'd be happy to see them go, and see the internet move back into a more person-to-person communication medium. Yet, as you point out, even this has costs. Maybe FreeNet will help with this, because it distributes the bandwidth across the whole network. We'll see. In the meantime, Clay Shirky suggests three options in his article:

1. Aggregation -- bundle a large number of low-value things together
2. Subscription -- pay for the site. I'm not sure if this will work (see: Slate.com), but maybe it would for a network of related sites (see: pr0n)
3. Subsidy -- Shirky points out that most real-world art centers (museums, operas, etc) are funded this way. This is what Amazon's Honor System is (not a micropayment as is often claimed). Goats and Penny Arcade are now trying this with PayPal and Amazon. Online comics are well suited for this type of system, I think, because they take a lot of work and skill to do right, and have a strong network of fans. It will be interesting to see if it works.

As for flat fees, your point only applies to the United States. I've heard that in other countries Internet access fees are generally per hour. As much as we like to think we're the only part of the world that matters, we're not :)

But remember that Europeans HATE this!

OpenPGP != OpenP2P

Well, a storage engine is important. But why does it have to be a server? Notes: The Next Generation (well, the official name is Groove) uses a P2P model.

Come to think of it, Domino also uses a P2P model to keep a network of servers in sync. It's a feature I find pretty impressive -- and I'm not a big Domino fan. In these days of powerful workstations and fast networking, all that storage and synchronization can just a easily occur on the desktop, eliminating most of the server's functions.

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Peer to peer. The O'Reilly site linked to above has an explanatory article here

Have you tried a side-by-side comparison of Mojo Nation and Gnutella? I haven't, but I would love to see the results. Mojo Nation is really pretty good.

Regards,

Zooko, who is off to run "apt-cache search gnutella"

P.S. Don't forget to read Evil Overlord Jim McCoy's response to the Shirky article. Judging by Shirky's later article, I would say that Jim scored some serious points and got Shirky to think again. (Not that Shirky blessed the Mojo Nation concept of integrated micropayments -- oh no... But he did start thinking more deeply about how different resources have different scarcity characteristics, which was one of our points in our response.)

Have you tried a side-by-side comparison of Mojo Nation and Gnutella? I haven't, but I would love to see the results. Mojo Nation is really pretty good.

Regards,

Zooko, who is off to run "apt-cache search gnutella"

P.S. Don't forget to read Evil Overlord Jim McCoy's response to the Shirky article. Judging by Shirky's later article, I would say that Jim scored some serious points and got Shirky to think again. (Not that Shirky blessed the Mojo Nation concept of integrated micropayments -- oh no... But he did start thinking more deeply about how different resources have different scarcity characteristics, which was one of our points in our response.)

Mojo Nation dwells on solving the free rider problem. Unfortunately, the real world doesn't have that problem. When I'm not using my computer and my bandwidth, both of which I've already paid for, why not share them. They don't really cost me anything more. O'Reilly's OpenP2P site has the article " In Praise of Freeloaders." It clearly explains why Mojo Nation is solving a problem that doesn't really exist.

Mojo Nation dwells on solving the free rider problem. Unfortunately, the real world doesn't have that problem. When I'm not using my computer and my bandwidth, both of which I've already paid for, why not share them. They don't really cost me anything more. O'Reilly's OpenP2P site has the article " In Praise of Freeloaders." It clearly explains why Mojo Nation is solving a problem that doesn't really exist.