A lot has happened in p2p technology during the first five years of its existence. Ever since the Big Bang of Napster we have been witnessing a rapid evolutionary process where a variety of different approaches, different networks and protocols, different clients and services have popped up and started to compete for the attention and the resources (bandwidth, content, computing power) of the downloading masses.
The diversity of environments and approaches has clearly been beneficial for the p2p technology. It has allowed a simultaneous development of several different core ideas and technologies like decentralization, supernodes, swarming, encryption, proxying. These technologies are now starting to mature, bearing fruit in the form of worked out and field tested solutions and software components. These will be the building blocks to be used by the designers of the next generation p2p – of course together with some fresh innovations of their own.
Where does it evolve from here? What are your thoughts and visions on the next generation p2p? What kind of network topologies and client architectures do you expect to see? What kind of social structures, identity schemes and trust systems do you expect to be developed? Do you envision new, exciting application areas, media types, modes of communication?
- tg
