boldeffect.com

The internet is not a a client-server technology. Sure there are some centralized systems that were designed in, such as the DNS roots, but the real model is one of equal peer nodes. As the net evolved over the years and became widely embraced by average folks things changed to the “great servers in the sky” model we have grown accustomed to now. The reasons are simple: access, expertise and security.

The typical way of getting on to the net was via slow, intermittently available dial-up links. No average consumer could afford a dedicated IP link to the home, so getting to the net became an event that was tackled as needed. You pointed your tiny computer at the one of the great computers in the sky and jacked-in. This access problem is almost behind us now as fast and cheap broadband is becoming more widely available.

Once you got online though, you needed to be an computer expert in order to do anything. I remember when an IP stack was an optional install in the mainline desktop OS’s and you needed to understand what your subnet mask was to make anything work. Eventually mainstream BBS’s like AOL became ISP’s and started to provide IP connectivity with with no setup. Today everything is net aware from birth. Plug the cable modem into the onboard ethernet jack of your PC and DCHP does the rest. But even with easy access to always on connectivity, you still need far too much expertise to set up the basic internet functions such as sendmail, httpd, dns. For these things the average joe still needs to go to a service provider like GoDaddy or hotmail, who can get everything working. If you did manage to get server like functions working on your own machine however, you have to worry about the bad guys. Far from the geeky utopia that was the internet of my youth, today’s internet is home to spam, viruses, trojans, worms, denial of service attacks, spyware, etc…The average joe is worried that hosting services on the internet in their home will let the boogie man in.

Because it’s too hard and it’s unsafe to set up your computer to have any server functionality the conventional wisdom says that most folks are just consumers of the internet, chewing thru webpages, and will not ever be equal nodes. But in reality, the trend is the other way. It’s estimated that today 20% of the traffic on the internet is for BitTorrent. This is not just for bootlegs and porn. Broadband providers in the UK are staring to pay consumers to carry p2p services and data across their machines. Blizzard delivers game updates to World Of Warcraft via Torrent. The reason is simple. There is no server hosting company that can cost effectively handle the capacity to stream the digital equivalent of a video store full of DVD quality movies. Netflix, and Blockbuster deliver almost as much data via the post-office than is carried on the entire internet every day.

I believe that these bandwidth intensive activities are only the leading indicators though. As soon as we solve the usability and security concerns we’ll start to see more and more a shifting back to the original design of the net. Why spend the time uploading your photos to flickr when you could press a button and have all the the photos on your PC avail in the same way with no uploading and no synchronization? Why use a blogging site when you could just save a file? Why email large attachments around when you can send a link to someone to go fetch em right off your machine? The next great set of internet apps will be created when we recognize and leverage this transformation.

If you’ll excuse me, I need to go log into my tivo to set it to record a show…