Web 2.0 Wish for 2006 - Peer 2.0!

It's a new year and many around the web are making predictions.  I don't know if my Web 2.0 prediction for 2006 is an actual prediction or if it is wishful thinking.  I do know I sincerely hope it will happen.

There will be a resurgence of Peer to Peer architectures.

Web 2.0's rhetoric is that it supports collaboration and communication - yet web 2.0's main architecture is centralized.  It's all centralized.

The masses are rarely well served by central control.

Your site goes down and your mission critical information is lost.  With well developed Peer to Peer application, there's always a backup.  With well developed Peer to Peer, you aren't held hostage if your company goes down.

RSS, in fact, can be seen as trying to bridge the gap between the flatness of the web and the communication of peer to peer systems.

Applications dying for a peer to peer system:

- Tagging.  Peer to peer systems would allow easier ad hoc community development, longer notation with each tag, backups for tags, off-line access to tagged information, and better stability

- 37Signals Suite.  Groove has this right, collaboration requires more than a simple centralized interface.  Collabaoration requires the ability to work when you need to and where you need to.  Losing work - especially long items like documents - because of a connectivity glitch it intollerable.

- Photo and music sharing.  When Michael Robertson sold MP3.com to CNet, a lot of artists lost a lot of content.  Nothing has been lost in peer to peer.

Peer to peer has been historically stand alone applications.  There's no reason why a central peer to peer technology that is browser based cannot be launched.  Perhaps this could be the real innovation from Flock.  Each Peer2.0 application would then be a plug-in for the browser.

This would allow the ease of operation and universal installation that Web 2.0 applications seek, but will  extend to include the additional control of peer to peer applications.

Comments

[Jay Fienberg]

Yes! I found it hard to look back on "web 2005" and not see centralization and avoidance of peer-to-peer development as one of it's strong biases. Coincidentally, I posted some thoughts about this too:

http://icite.net/blog/200512/hmm_2005.html

[Jay Fienberg]

Also, have you heard about AllPeers ( http://www.allpeers.com ). It's a bittorrent p2p client extension for Firefox, that is due to come out soon.

Maybe this year will reverse some of last year's centralized excesses. . .