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Future Technology : World’s Best P2P Softwares - An Analysis
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The last decade has been particularly interesting in the world of Technology. We have seen Java become mainstream, we saw Google come of age, Linux became mainstream server OS and the Open Source movement took off. This article is not about technology but rather the resource sharing peer-to-peer technology which have impacted the way technology has evolved. Today, this technology is the most used in the world, in terms of internet bandwidth consumed - about 60%. In the future, P2P will consume about 90% of the world’s internet bandwidth, a situation which most ISP’s are trying to overcome. There are arguments both ways - some say they are management nightmares for ISP’s, technologists say that they are the biggest breakthroughs and organizations like RIA and MPAA would prefer a world without most of them. However, all in all, it is here to stay.
Sometimes, some companies are trendsetters and they impact the evolution of technology, which is where the VC’s put their money and companies their R&D efforts. Let’s look at the Top 6 technological breakthroughs in P2P technology over the last decade, in no particular order -
- Usenet
- eDonkey
- BitTorrent
- Skype
- MetaASO Mermaid
- Faroo
Usenet was conceived by Duke University students Tom Trustcott and Jim Ellis. I quote from Wikipedia, “Usenet is distributed among a large, constantly changing conglomeration of servers which store and forward messages to one another. These servers are loosely connected in a variable mesh. Individual users usually read from and post messages to a local server operated by their ISP, university or employer. The servers then exchange the messages between one another, so that they are available to readers beyond the original server.” The most commonly used feature of Usenet is its capability of Binary Attachments. Any news item could contain files and this feature is used to transfer files between people around the globe.
The eDonkey network (also known as the eDonkey2000 network or eD2k) is a decentralized, mostly server-based, peer-to-peer file sharing network best suited to share large files among users and to provide long term availability of said files. In practical terms, it is mostly used to share video files, full music albums and computer programs. Like most file sharing networks, it is decentralized, as there is not any central hub for the network; also, files are not stored on a central server but are exchanged directly between users based on the peer-to-peer principle. (source - Wikipedia) Though Napster was the most famous P2P network of its time but it was closed down due to legal lawsuits. eDonkey is a commercial software while there are other free softwares like eMule, Kazaa and Limewire which are used by users which work on similar principles.
BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer program developed by Bram Cohen and BitTorrent Inc and used for uploading and downloading files via the bitTorrent protocol. BitTorrent was the first client written for the protocol. Other clients are Azureus and uTorrent. When you want to share a file you have to create a Torrent file for it and register it with a Tracker Website. Then you can post the torrent on any website or share it with your friends who can add the Torrent file to a BitTorrent client, which will then download the file for you. The process of creating a torrent is a bit involved and hence softwares like eDonkey are preferred over BitTorrent by most users. For example in eMule you can drop your file into the client and you will get a link which you can directly share with your friends.
Skype is a P2P Voice-Over-IP software created by Niklas Zenstromm and Janus Friis. It allows users to call their friends over the internet. It was the first VOIP software which worked in a P2P fashion without using any central servers. It also allows calling PSTN numbers through its client for a small charge. It was innovative in many senses, for example, it used a Distributed Hash table for authentication and authorization.
MetaASO Mermaid is the only item in this list which is not the name of a software but rather the name of a product suite. It contains about 20 products of which 5 have been released. It was created in 2002 by Aditya Yadav and his friends from IIT’s, MIT and Stanford. These softwares are used to broadcast News, real time video, web conferencing and other things. These softwares absolutely don’t use any servers and can concurrently by used by a billion people around the globe. Mermaid is for real time global broadcasts what Skype is to Internet Telephony.
FAROO is a program, that implements web search based on peer-to-peer technology. After the program is downloaded and installed, the searcher becomes part of a world wide distributed search engine. Every web page visited is automatically included in the index of the search engine. The ranking of search results is based on a distributed usage statistics of the web pages visited by FAROO users. Faroo is doing to search what Kazaa & eDonkey did to file sharing.
Conclusion:
One thing that one can draw from the above is that to create truly global systems, one has to move away from client/server models, which means that website based systems cannot serve the global population and the above softwares are an indication of the things to come. Each is special in their own field but the trend is to create global software systems that cross the boundaries of operating systems, locations and devices.
Hey Shayon
Good coverage of P2Pware, i was wondering if you have tried out RockeTalk as a P2P freeware, RockeTalk is a Mobile social media Application through whih you can share Audio, video, text and Pictures. The public beta was launched in july and soon other file format transfers will also be enabled.
Do checkit out
Sameer