On Wed, Feb 23, 2011 at 3:12 AM, Michel Bauwens <[email protected]> wrote:
I find this an interesting remark, in all likelyhood, corporate platforms do reverse engineering, ie. they start from user needs and build backwards,
They actually do both. They invest in some form of infrastructure to deploy their services on, that can handle the bandwidth, storage and processing needs they are anticipating. Yet, no doubt you are right much time is spent on the design of the user interface. Definitely not an either/or proposition.
the opposite strategy, building a pure internet but not looking at user needs, may suffer in comparison,
Michel
I agree. It is crucial that software and applications, and the hardware infrastructure progress in parallel, but also in collaboration. Truly, both are equally important, as they are for commercial entities. I think that massively great strides have been made with web applications like StatusNet, http://status.net/ and diaspora http://joindiaspora.com/ those two examples can easily hold their own in terms of usability in comparison to what is available commercially. Those of us that are more focused on creating a distributed infrastructure think that it is crucial that HTTP protocol-based applications (the web) be able to operate on distributed infrastructure. I think, for instance there are some possibilities right now with using http://yaws.hyber.org/ as the webserver, and couchdb or Raik as a distributed data store. There is also http://www.danga.com/mogilefs/ http://memcached.org/ http://gearman.org/ and many other technologies that could be used in developing distributed versions of web applications. The important thing from my perspective is that we need to dispell the myth that this is about infrastructure vs. user interface, or web vs. p2p internet technologies. These are *no longer* "either/or" propositions. The "next net", the distributed internet(s), need to afford all of this in parallel, and in collaboration. The distributed internet needs to support the web. This is arguably far more realistic than any one niche winning out over time, no matter how large or small it is.
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Quora <[email protected]> Date: Wed, Feb 23, 2011 at 4:32 AM Subject: New answer to "What are the fundamental requirements and building blocks of a distributed internet?" To: [email protected]
New answer to "What are the fundamental requirements and building blocks of a distributed internet?"
Leslie Michael Orchard: Some other characteristics to note involve practical usability, eg. what happens after I plug in the magic black box I just bought:
Discoverability - how do I find friends and interesting things? Aggregation - how can I follow friends and interesting things I find? Publishing - how can I broadcast interesting things to my friends and followers?
These are some of the things that centralized communication services are nailing, at the moment. No matter how the underlying fabric of a distributed net is made, if it doesn't serve some of these basic human-centric needs, it won't take off.
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