Right now I have the feeling that a lot of people are thinking about the same problem. It might be called de-centralized network architecture. I guess Gnutella and Freenet brought these ideas to a wide audience, and now you can hear the gears churning and the light bulbs going on all over the net. Aha! Put the client and the server together, at every node, and really banish the center. WorldOS is trying to define a framework for doing just that. This page has some details about routing messages in a network without any central nodes. God, I am so excited about this stuff. It's part web architecture problem, and part deconstructive philosophy experiment. Today the web is more like several interconnected hubs (with the huge portal/search engines at the centers.) Tomorrow's web might really be a web, with messaging propagating peer to peer (to peer to peer...) and not "up" to some authority and then back "down" to a destination.
Here's just one example of what sort of change this new thinking might affect. (I heard this example used somewhat similarly before, but now can't remember where.)
Take ebay, a very popular application of today's web. Tomorrow it might be gone. Here's why. Ebay provides an on line space for people to come together and do their business (buying and selling stuff.) Ebay is a central hub connecting all of their users (by connecting all of those user browsers to the ebay server.) But in the decentralized peer to peer web that I think is emerging, every node (every machine connected to the internet, whether it's browsing or serving) will be both browser and server. The "space" that ebay provides for people to come together in and do their business, can be redefined as queries and responses across the peer to peer web. What you are looking for goes out from your machine as a query. The query ("Do you have any Pez dispensers for sale?") is sent to any and all machines directly connected to your machine. Those machines take a look at the query and then pass it along to all the machines they are connected to. And then they tell two friends, and they tell two friends, and so on, and so on... You don't post your request in a central place, the central place is distributed throughout the network as series of propagating queries and respones. The center is everywhere (or nowhere.) Each query (and each multiplying instance of each query) keeps track of the route it has traced, and when a response is found, it backtracks it's way home to where it originated. So where today ebay is a site (and as such can be run by a single entity which can take a small cut of all the action,) tomorrow ebay might just be a protocol defining the connections between a distributed network of users (note the missing part where one party gets a cut of all the action.)
We are just moving into an era of processing power where we can begin thinking about this new kind of network structure. There are still problems to be worked out. But if your business (or personal) plan revolves around brokering deals between entities on the web, you better think about where all this is going. The whole idea of what (or where) "between" two points is might be called into question in the not too distant future.
cool--whats our plan for the future??
Why is it that you think ebay might be gone someday? I understand your thinking but, don't we need that central hub to continue to work?
Are you proposing that eventually all you will need to do is search what you are looking for and it will pop up?
What about the safety aspect that ebay brings to the mix?
I should have bought ebay stock years ago!
email me on this if you would as I have no idea how I found your posting.
bc69ss@yahoo.com
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- jim 6-07-2000 8:53 pm
Here's just one example of what sort of change this new thinking might affect. (I heard this example used somewhat similarly before, but now can't remember where.)
Take ebay, a very popular application of today's web. Tomorrow it might be gone. Here's why. Ebay provides an on line space for people to come together and do their business (buying and selling stuff.) Ebay is a central hub connecting all of their users (by connecting all of those user browsers to the ebay server.) But in the decentralized peer to peer web that I think is emerging, every node (every machine connected to the internet, whether it's browsing or serving) will be both browser and server. The "space" that ebay provides for people to come together in and do their business, can be redefined as queries and responses across the peer to peer web. What you are looking for goes out from your machine as a query. The query ("Do you have any Pez dispensers for sale?") is sent to any and all machines directly connected to your machine. Those machines take a look at the query and then pass it along to all the machines they are connected to. And then they tell two friends, and they tell two friends, and so on, and so on... You don't post your request in a central place, the central place is distributed throughout the network as series of propagating queries and respones. The center is everywhere (or nowhere.) Each query (and each multiplying instance of each query) keeps track of the route it has traced, and when a response is found, it backtracks it's way home to where it originated. So where today ebay is a site (and as such can be run by a single entity which can take a small cut of all the action,) tomorrow ebay might just be a protocol defining the connections between a distributed network of users (note the missing part where one party gets a cut of all the action.)
We are just moving into an era of processing power where we can begin thinking about this new kind of network structure. There are still problems to be worked out. But if your business (or personal) plan revolves around brokering deals between entities on the web, you better think about where all this is going. The whole idea of what (or where) "between" two points is might be called into question in the not too distant future.
- jim 6-07-2000 9:06 pm
cool--whats our plan for the future??
- Skinny 6-10-2000 6:07 pm
Why is it that you think ebay might be gone someday? I understand your thinking but, don't we need that central hub to continue to work? Are you proposing that eventually all you will need to do is search what you are looking for and it will pop up? What about the safety aspect that ebay brings to the mix? I should have bought ebay stock years ago! email me on this if you would as I have no idea how I found your posting. bc69ss@yahoo.com
- anonymous (guest) 1-07-2003 9:57 pm