Brainstorm: p2p client

I remeber that Naptella thread from long ago and it stuck out in my mind because that is when I realized that p2p networks must have a social conscience in order to succeed. There are a few techniues that must be employed that connect people to people along with their libraries. While TankGirl was wrankling with the behind-the-scenes protocalls that would allow a serverless network to exist, I wondered about the superficial features that users would see when they used the software.

At the time TankGirl presented her idea Gnutella was both fairly new and fairly usable. Since then that network has deteriorated (especially for us 56Kers). The funny thing about Gnutella's interface is that it's guts are plainly visible in the UI. Most of it's code is dedicated to maintaining the network rather than allowing convenient filesharing. So TankGirl suggested a p2p network that would work kinda like Napster and kinda like Gnutella, serverless yet centered around filesharing.

Well I think the main part of maintaining a community is communication, and that is what Napster really had going for it. Serverless networks don't facilitate that kind of communication because their users can't 'meet' on a central server that's always connected. In this respect I think that the old Hotline system was better than serverless p2p. With Hotline, like FTP, you would connect to a small server that hosted about 20 or 30 users who uploaded and downloaded mp3's to and from that server. The administrator would decide what files would be shared and discarded and organize the files into thematic directories. The things that distinguished it from FTP were the news, chat, and IM functions. The admin would periodically post messages to a news file, and any user could talk to any other user on the server. I was attracted to the servers by the music libraries that I could browse, every once in a while I would find a song I had forgotten about. I liked chatting too. Now I think that it's time to resurect the Hotline idea and make it serverless.

To that end there needs to be a few features in a p2p client's interface that not only facilitates but also promotes communication between users. A p2p program that allows library browsing should have a chat screen integrated into the hotlist window. When you hotlist a user, you connect to that user's personal chat channel and can talk to that user and anyone else who is connected to that channel. Naturally people will hotlist users with the largest libraries (who also happen to have the most bandwidth) and people will hotlist libraries that have music they like. As a result people who like the same music will easily find each other.

The hotlist/chat window will obviously contain a list of users that are currently connected. The program should list the songs that the users are currently listening to beside their names in that list. This would accent the the way people browse. When you see that someone is listening to a song you've never heard you can ask them what it's like and how much they like it.

When a couple dozen users are connected to one user they can search and hotlist each other's libraries. The network would be small and the total number of files low, but everyone on the network would share the same musical interests so finding good music would not be difficult. This 'pocket network' would be the foundation of relationships that would last and a community that stays together. Eventually the pocket networks would merge as they find each other.

I think this constitutes a protocall that would support a serverless network on its own. Each node would have the ability to act as file hosts, chat servers, and search engines, fulfilling the basic needs of a p2p network. When two nodes connect together they trade hotlist information. This allows the two users to search and browse each other's files. Then when more nodes connect they exchange hotlist info with the node with the most connections, or the mother node. The mother node would mintain an image of the network that it would distribute to all other nodes, that way if the mother node disconnects all the other nodes would have the information they need to reconstruct the pocket network.

The pocket networks would necessarily be small to avoid the problems Gnutella is having, but a small network wouldn't be too bad for the reasons I described above. The main obstacle would be finding other users to connect to, but Aimster has solved that problem. AIM and ICQ can provide the IP inforamtion needed to start a new network or find an existing network, and users would add the people they find to their buddy lists. The client would import the buddy lists from AIM and ICQ and make them available to others on the network. As users move around from one pocket network to an other the overall network would constantly change and there would be no shortage of new and interesting songs to share.