Peer To Peer Future

Sharing files is what we very often want and need to do. Sharing started all the idea of computer networks. I remember back in the early 90's when I set up my first company, we were just a couple of people in two small rooms, everybody having their own, standalone PC. Floppy disks were the only way to share files. No recordable CDs (I remember our CEO had a CD ROM drive using a special caddy to house a CD, but nobody dreamed at that time of being able to record a CD at home...). No USB flash keys. And no network between us. So we used floppy disks, 1,44MB capacity to write and carry and read files among our machines. There were networks, but they were expensive. Novell had their Netware 2,20 and later 3,12, with servers written in assembly language, because the guy who wrote them could not remember if you placed a star on the left or the right in C++. But Netware was too expensive for a small startup like us. Fortunately for us Novell introduced Netware Lite, 99$ per PC and what was important - the Lite did not require dedicated server. Everybody could be a "server", sharing own resources (files and printers) with others on a peer-to-peer basis. Netware Lite was neither fast nor reliable, but it helped us a lot. Instead of dealing with floppy disks, we could just "map" somebody else's drive as own and read/write to it over Ethernet cable.

The "sharing problem" is still with us in the Internet era. We snap pictures with our electronic cameras. We record videos. We use various applications to compose our work documents, our art and 9 out of 10 times we want to share them with our friends and family. So what do we do? Of course email. But remember, not so long ago (actually before Gmail), the usual mailbox limit was around 4 megabytes. Not that much larger than a floppy disk in dark ages. Google has come to the rescue with their infinite mailbox storage. Yes, I say infinite, because I seriously doubt it will ever be a limit for a typical user (you have probably noticed your Gmail account grows as you keep adding new emails to it, mine after 2 years is 11% full, and believe me, Google will add storage when you are approaching the limit). But is Gmail really a rescue tothe third millennium file sharing problem? While it's 2,5 GB in size, it does not accept an email bigger than 10MB. What is 10MB? Two JPEG pictures from your digital camera? When I come back from holidays, I have something like 2GB of pictures, I would like to share. Of course I can email a couple of recordable CDs to my family. But shouldn't it be possible just to point them to a link to a folder on my computer? And what happens when I want to share a video with them? 60 minutes of DV quality is something like 30GB. Can you burn that on CDs? No.... Of course you can use the Moviemaker to compress to whatever format you like, but it will take you two days and still you will end up with 3GB, so the only method is to burn that on DVD and go to the post office. You see how much the Internet has to grow, it is still so immature for things like sending a just recorded movie of a newborn child to grandmothers and grandfathers... Shouldn't it be simpler?

There comes the idea of peer-to-peer file sharing over the internet. You have a PC with a set of folders on a disk. My Pictures, My Videos and so on... Share them with your family and friends... But how? There are of course many applications that are doing this. But all of them have two common problems. One is they very often require a complicated setup on your routers and firewalls. Second is, there is virtually no security. The Internet is not a secure place to be. So all your data should be well guarded while it travels. It is your data and you do not want anybody else to play with it. There have been several peer-to-peer solutions showing up recently. At least two of them attracted me and I think they are harbingers of things to come.

AllPeers (http://www.allpeers.com/) is the first one. There is not much I can say about it, since it is in the "coming soon" phase. But it seems to address the issue very well with the "share exactly what you want with who you want" statement. If it is as easy as the demo promises, AllPeers may be the story of 2006.

hamachi (http://www.hamachi.cc/) is the second and seems to have potentially bigger impact. It is the first secure peer-to-peer technology with widespread acceptance. They say it is "fast, secure and simple". Isn't it exactly what we need?

2006 may be really the year of peer-to-peer ascendance. And I do not mean scenarios like illegal music swapping services. I mean secure virtual private networks, that are easy to set up between you and your friends, family, and even coworkers in simple and needed collaboration scenarios. How long will the post office take money for using postman to deliver bits on CDs?

Good and accepted peer-to-peer software may generate mountains of cash for Internet providers. If you think you have a fast Internet connection, try to send 100 high - quality pictures to a photo lab. That is it - most of us have ADSL broadband, where "A" stands for asymmetric, so while the data from the Net down to you travels fairly fast, it is painfully slow from you up to the Net. And this will be critical once we develop our Net sharing habits. With peer-to-peer applications we will be willing to upgrade from ADSLs to fiber optic connections more eagerly than we used to be on the way from 56kbps analog modems to ADSL lines. Operators - remodel your strategy, investors - prepare your picks. Peer-to-peer is coming from behind, even if the big boys from Redmond and Mountain View don't see it (yet).