Clay Shirky Defends P2P

richard writes: "Clay Shirky has responded to Jon Katz's article, Does P2P Suck?, (and a WSJ article published the same day) in an article titled "Backlash!" on OpenP2P.com. Shirky says: "P2P means many things to many people. PC users don't have to be second-class citizens. PCs can be woven directly into the Internet. Content can be provided from the edges of the network just as surely as from the center. Millions of small computers can be more reliable than one giant server. Millions of small CPUs can do the work of a supercomputer. ... These are sloppy ideas, ideas that don't describe a technology or a business model, but they are also big ideas, and they are also good ideas.""

Comments

So what in heck is this P2P thing?

[Jordy]

I never particularly liked the term peer-to-peer. I'm not exactly sure who originally coined it, but it seems to cause a lot of confusion with other technologies which sometimes piggyback ontop of it.

P2P, Distributed Aggregation and Distributed Computing are three separate but related things.

Peer-to-peer is simply a type of network where all nodes on the system are on equal standing with each other. There are no dedicated server machines, no dedicated client machines, but rather everyone is both a server and a client and they communicate with eachother as equals.

This type of system lends itself to a very interesting change in the way someone finds information. Instead of going to a place (e.g. slashdot.org) to get information, you go to the information to get a place.

Distributed aggregation is a method of intelligently locating and well, aggregating resources distributed among nodes across a network. Whether these resources are files, CPU time or disk space, the method of aggregation should remain basically the same. This fits in very well with the peer-to-peer model to provide each node with a simple way of locating resources on other machines.

Distributed computing is a method of using resources distributed among nodes across a network. Distributed aggregation can be thought of a part of distributed computing as you have to be able to find the resources to use them, but not all distributed computing systems provide or even need a method of handling dynamic changes in the network. Of course, distributed computing systems are not typically peer-to-peer. Individual nodes on the network rarely communicate with each other to share information, but instead handle jobs in batch fashion and push the results up to a central server.

Many have argued that peer-to-peer has existed on the Internet since time began and that all things are basically peer-to-peer. This is quite true in some respects. At the protocol level, machines communicate with other machines in a manner that can be considered peer-to-peer, but historically at the application level there have been a very clear line between servers and clients.

We currently live in a world where the majority of computers are nothing more than glorified dumb terminals utilizing only a small fraction of their computing power. My hope is that one day, the average person won't "use" the Internet, but instead "be" the Internet.

Of course, that's just my opinion. I could be wrong.

You are right.. but the thing is..

[mindstrm]

IT's the normal everyday sheeple that don't get this. THe fact that it's true doesn't make them understand any better...
You and I and lots of others know how the internet works.. we don't like the 'centralized broadcast' way it's starting to be used.. and don't like how people insist that p2p is something 'new'.. but think about this.

For mom & pop jones out there.. it IS something new. Sure they could have always done it.. but are just now realizing it. To them, it's NEW. The applications are new... everything is new. So it'
s good to have articles like this....

PCs as first-class citizens

[eries]

I really thought that his point about making PCs first-class citizens of the 'Net was the most important, and one that needs to be driven home as much as possible. I still think that true freedom for web users (who must always rely on corporate connection providers) will derive from widespread, mainstream adoption of something like Freenet. I argued this point in an article I wrote for freshmeat called the World Free Web. I had hoped that we could jump-start that process by integrating Freenet with web browsers, effectively using Freenet as a huge, decentralized backup to the web - on that was out of any entity's control. I'm still working on getting people to work on this idea, so email me if you are interested...

PCs as "First Class Citizens"

[NatePWIII]

I hate to be the bearer of bad news but PCs will never be first class citizens on the NET until everyone either has Cable, DSL or Fiber Optic running to their house and their PC is reliably connected to the NET. That is why up 'till now PC's have always remained second class citizens, its not the PC's fault. Processing power is not a problem here, it CONNECTIVITY. Imagine if your PC and everyone elses were connected to the NET reliably and 24/7, also each PC had it own unique IP address or someway of identifying it (pray for IP V6). Think of the power, the possibilities, that is where we want to be but until we get the reliable bandwidth and permanent "on-all-the-time" connections, this is nothing more than a pipe dream.

Nathaniel P. Wilkerson
Domain Names for $13

Re:Revolution

[Raunchola]

P2P is a revolution in the making...

The very concept of peer-to-peer has been around since the early days (very early days) of the Internet. ARPANET was originally intended to be decentralized, in case of Global Thermonuclear Warfare (sorry, just finished watching a DVD of War Games :)), so that if one node died, the others would still be around.

"P2P" (God I hate that stupid buzzword) is just a commercially friendly term to describe something that's already been around for 30 years. I fail to see the revolution here.

...and tradition businesses are trying to crush it... It's as simple as that.

With the obvious exceptions of the RIAA and the MPAA, what businesses are trying to destroy the peer-to-peer concept? Hell, not many businesses are even getting into the concept. Why? Because, thanks in part to Napster, businesses don't see a lot of worth in the concept, unless they want to trade MP3s (or porn or movies). Granted, Napster is moving along to a subscription-based service, but there's still no guarantees that, in the end, it'll be successful. Maybe if someone develops a peer-to-peer service (yes, I'm aware of Freenet) that isn't being utilized by people trading Metallica MP3s, Jenna Jameson pictures, and Quicktime files of Gladiator, then maybe one of the big players will jump in.

As I see it, "P2P" (Did I mention that I fucking hate that buzzword?) is just a fad. The concept already exists people, just ask the people who worked on the ARPANET. Giving the concept a hip new acronym and a few evangelizers doesn't make it any bigger of a revolution than it already is.

--

Shirky is a weak writer

[wytcld]

Shirkey says "The invention of the image tag, as part of the Mosaic browser (ancestor of Netscape), brought a GUI to the previously text-only Internet in exactly the same way that, a decade earlier, Apple brought a GUI to the previously text-only operating system." History simplified to the point of almost being wrong does us no service. The image tag was neither a GUI nor invented for Mosaic. It came out of CERN where the physicists wanted to put illustrations in their documents. Mosaic was just an early implementation of a browser that could run in existing GUI OS's and that implemented the CERN standards.

A few paragraphs later his theme is "big, sloppy ideas." Yeah, fine, he gets big and sloppy about his ideas of the past, and then parallels that distortion to a present he doesn't begin to define, and this passes for analysis? In a really vague way he may be waving his arms in the right direction, but why are we even trying to listen to someone whose prattling skirts close to the edge of intellectual dishonesty? It's like those old "make millions from the Internet" spams. Sure, you could make millions back in the day, by not by following the advice in those missives. It's because the likes of Shirky have been listened to by too many VCs and editors that the tech economy is so shakey now - false intelligence is more dangerous than ignorance.