The term "peer-to-peer" has come to be applied to networks that expect end users to contribute their own files, computing time, or other resources to some shared project. Even more interesting than the systems' technical underpinnings are their socially disruptive potential: in various ways they return content, choice, and control to ordinary users.While this book is mostly about the technical promise of peer-to-peer, we also talk about its exciting social promise. Communities have been forming on the Internet for a long time, but they have been limited by the flat interactive qualities of email and Network newsgroups. People can exchange recommendations and ideas over these media, but have great difficulty commenting on each other's postings, structuring information, performing searches, or creating summaries. If tools provided ways to organize information intelligently, and if each person could serve up his or her own data and retrieve others' data, the possibilities for collaboration would take off. Peer-to-peer technologies along with metadata could enhance almost any group of people who share an interest—technical, cultural, political, medical, you name it.This book presents the goals that drive the developers of the best-known peer-to-peer systems, the problems they've faced, and the technical solutions they've found. Learn here the essentials of peer-to-peer from leaders of the field:
Nelson Minar
and
Marc Hedlund
Popular Power
, on a history of peer-to-peer
Clay Shirky
of
acceleratorgroup
, on where peer-to-peer is likely to be headed
Tim O'Reilly
O'Reilly & Associates
, on redefining the public's perceptions
Dan Bricklin
, cocreator of
Visicalc
, on harvesting information from end-users
David Anderson
SETI@home
, on how SETI@Home created the world's largest computer
Jeremie Miller
Jabber
, on the Internet as a collection of conversations
Gene Kan
Gnutella
GoneSilent.com
, on lessons from Gnutella for peer-to-peer technologies
Adam Langley
Freenet
, on Freenet's present and upcoming architecture
Alan Brown
of Red Rover, on a deliberately low-tech content distribution system
Marc Waldman
,
Lorrie Cranor
, and
Avi Rubin
AT&T Labs
, on the
Publius
project and trust in distributed systems
Roger Dingledine
Michael J. Freedman
David Molnar
Free Haven
, on resource allocation and accountability in distributed systems
Rael Dornfest
O'Reilly Network
Dan Brickley
of ILRT/RDF Web, on metadata
Theodore Hong
, on performance
Richard Lethin
Reputation Technologies
, on how reputation can be built online
Jon Udell
BYTE
Nimisha Asthagiri
Walter Tuvell
Groove Networks
, on security
Brandon Wiley
, on gateways between peer-to-peer systems
You'll find information on the latest and greatest systems as well as upcoming efforts in this book.