Peer-to-peer (P2P) is an undersold technology.
A couple of recent events made me think of some valuable uses for P2P.
The first event was my wife suggesting that we buy a FAX machine. We have FAX, but it's via J2, a service provider that has a FAX-to-email gateway. J2 is the perfect solution for us: we can send and receive FAXes anytime without having to dedicate a phone line specifically for a FAX machine. To me, FAX just seems so retro. It is hard to argue against the simplicity of FAX, which I suppose is why FAX machines are so popular. The one real problem with FAX is that it uses the public telephone network, which, of course, is analog for the first and last mile. Can't we maintain the simplicity of a FAX machine, but use IP as the transport instead? We can, but that requires a P2P infrastructure: my FAX machine needs to use P2P to connect to your FAX machine. FAX is really nothing more than a P2P technology over dial-up lines.
The second event was my trying to set up a new Linux box. The install went okay. I had IP connectivity via a network to my laptop running Windows 2000. The problem was, I didn't have the connectivity applications running: no FTP server and no HTTP server on either computer, and no Samba on the Linux box. I needed to transfer files between the two computers in both directions. Sure, installing an FTP server is one way to enable that. But it seems like there ought to be an easier way. I should be able to run an application on one computer and tell it to receive, and run an application on the other computer and tell it to send. I should give the same password to each application, so that both the sender and the receiver mutually authenticate each other and even encypt the data. Here, again, is the perfect problem for a P2P solution.
In the past, we have seen technologies that fit the pattern of "solution looking for a problem." This is clearly not the case for P2P. There are real problems that P2P solves.
Posted by Doug Sauder at April 19, 2004 01:13 PM