by Raj Singh, Submitted exclusively for Zeropaid.com
P2P filesharing is dead. That’s right, filesharing has been ruled as illegal and will be ended as soon as the DOJ finishes the paper work. So what now, well I guess the music downloading is getting old so how about some P2P games, or maybe some P2P entertainment, possibly even some P2P news or what about P2P business tools; you always need those, right?
Well, I will admit, your right, P2P filesharing is not dead but as you can see, P2P is not limited to the filesharing niche most of you think, but rather a whole new paradigm encompassing a variety of uses that you may have initially overlooked. P2P has been around for a long time and no, it was not invented by Napster; let’s take a look.
Everyone has played Warcraft or Diablo and most of you have also played each other via the Internet. Its multi-player option allows you to connect to other players through their server and battle each other. Did you realize that you were using P2P when you were playing; probably not. How about every other gaming community? These days if your game doesn’t support P2P, it will not survive.
Or what about AIM, and all of the other instant messaging applications available. Did it occur to you, that this was yet another example of P2P power?
How about those companies who are attempting to create pure P2P gaming and chat clients based on the Gnutella model, a couple come to mind. Ok, so what does this mean? Well, rather then creating point-to-point connections to a central server or to a variety of users, I connect to those around me and they connect to those around them and so forth. When I establish a multiplayer game or a chat session, my data may be proxied across many nodes on the network before it reaches the destination. Well, there is definitely a lot of overhead but you do eliminate the need for servers. Anyways, my point being, that the P2P paradigm has been around for quite some time but has just now begun entering new markets. Soon services of all types will be affected by this paradigm shift. Who needs an EBay, when you can link auctions conducted by each seller individually?
Let’s take another scenario, how about a dating service? Most web based dating services ask you the normal, who, what, where and so forth. They then calculate your so-called “match”. But let’s take a look at this from a P2P scenario. I submit my preferences into a P2P client. I then connect to my friends; we have now achieved our little network. Now I begin to look for a match in my little network, ok, no luck. Let’s begin looking at their friends and even their friends. Eventually I will find my match and hopefully before I circle the world. Picture, how easy it would be to add this feature to any filesharing application? This is not too much work or is it?
You see, the P2P infrastructure has been created. Filesharing is an application of the P2P infrastructure. With this in place, it is now a matter of moving services to P2P. Whether their economically viable or not, the next internet is not going to be the current Internet but a new internet; it will be a P2P internet where every user’s application can P2P. They can cooperatively work on documents, they can play multiplayer games, and they can continue to share their data and chat. Get ready for the P2P revolution.
By Raj Singh
Founder of Terazima and a panelist for many P2P events
Raj will be writing a monthly article for Zeropaid.com, this is his first.
