[P2P-F] Fwd: New answer to "What are the fundamental requirements and building blocks of a distributed internet?"

[Samuel Rose]

On Wed, Feb 23, 2011 at 3:12 AM, Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com> 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 <noreply at quora.com>
> 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: michelsub2004 at gmail.com
>
>
> 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.
>
> To see the question page with all answers, visit:
> http://www.quora.com/l/i9BzsP5d
>
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> The Quora Team
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Sam Rose
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