Web 2.0 is P2P (in a social sense), done with Web 1.0 tools and old infrastructure.

Against the inane and one-sided conceptions peddled by some that the “internet is dead” and no longer a pure peer to peer network (which it never was!), here is a rather more insightful article (from
ReadWrite Web) that correctly sees the contradictions of the current model, and advices a realistic way forward, which is to deepen the p2p aspects of the current network.

Kirill Pertsev:

“Then Web 2.0 came along, and everything started to change. Today, most popular sites were created by ordinary users who care less about owning content than about sharing it with others. Developers created ecosystems and gave users tools to track each other and exchange content, and sites became service providers instead of content sources.

What happened to the Internet’s infrastructure, then? Nothing. Imagine YouTube going out of business: the entire infrastructure for that video would disappear in a day, but the videos themselves would still exist, scattered among computers of individual users, stuck on cell phones, caught in caches, etc.

Now take that one step further: instead of YouTube, we have a P2P network, full of videos and convenient tools to watch and upload them. Nobody can close this network or put it out of business. Sufficiently large P2P networks are invincible; if you don’t believe that, ask the MPAA and RIAA.

Web 2.0 is P2P (in a social sense), done with Web 1.0 tools and old infrastructure. To unlock a box with a whole set of new services, we need to upgrade the infrastructure. Just as Gopher was replaced by WWW, and UUCP was replaced by SMTP, the current star-shaped web infrastructure will be replaced by a mesh-shaped cloud network. Data centers would still exist, but instead of providing bandwidth and servers, they would provide reliability and accessibility. (And a system of measurement would need to be established for both.)

We can call this a “social Internet infrastructure”: an infrastructure that reflects new social behavior, that allows anyone to connect and share content with anyone else, while still enjoying sufficient privacy and security. It’s not so much a revolution as an evolution: another step in a process that has been occuring for some time already. It happened to the telephone system — does anyone remember having to call a phone station to be put through to another person? I’ve only read about it in books. It will happen to the Internet eventually, too.”

So what we need then, is steps towards a zero-configuration p2p internet!

Kirill Pertsev continues:

“Another benefit of P2P is that it requires zero configuration. Skype is probably not the best IP phone around, nor was it the first; but you don’t have to be a telecommunications engineer to use it. You download the installer, run it, register yourself as a user, and off you go, from nothing to brilliant conversation in a few minutes.

As with content distribution, implementing a P2P network that requires no configuration isn’t an easy task, but it dramatically reduces the number of users who drop off from being intimidated by the technology or feeling they lack the necessary skill. For many services, this is the difference between 100,000 users and 10 million users, or between going out of business as soon as venture money dries up and being profitable within a year.

Zero-configuration P2P has to do with more than just P2P, though. It also implies being able to fully network with zero configuration: the ability to connect any device anywhere using any available connection. Unattended sensors, medical IT devices, military computers, none of these should require in-field configuration. The people who use them generally don’t have time to read instruction manuals. They should be able to open the box, insert batteries, and have a workable device within seconds. This is what zero configuration gives users: a choice, not just between high and low profitability, but between life and death.

Even in the case of lower-profile applications, zero-configuration P2P can cut deployment costs tremendously — and well-implemented P2P platforms could reduce those costs to almost nothing. On such a platform, for example, setting up a new message-processing server for a financial system would be as easy as opening the box, throwing the server on the rack, plugging in the ethernet and power cables, and nothing else.

Ubiquitous connectivity simplifies development costs. Message-passing platforms wouldn’t need to account for different types of hosts, relays, connectivity fall-backs, and so on. You would simply confirm that the peer is up and then send it a message. Done. Think of how many networked hosts out there are actually “gateways” between email and text messages, between Internet and Intranets, between X and Y technologies. When one networked device can securely connect with any other, many problems simply evaporate. Before TCP/IP took the world by storm, gazillions of networking technologies existed. No one remembers their names, not because they were inadequate, but because TCP/IP was everywhere, and it’s much easier to speak the common language than to teach others a “better” one.”