Program Overview
The O'Reilly Peer-to-Peer and Web Services Conference explores the business, technical and societal issues raised by the most revolutionary Internet technologies since the appearance of the Web. Gnutella, Groove, Jabber, .NET, Freenet, SOAP/XML-RPC, JXTA--you name it, they'll all be there, under one roof, providing a unique opportunity to meet, mingle, and learn from the innovators inventing the next generation of the Internet. Discover how the new frameworks and applications influence these important areas:
Collaboration
A collaborative, interactive Web was part of Tim Berners-Lee's original vision. But in the move to client-server architecture, collaboration and community went pretty much out the window. Peer-to-peer offers the potential to return the Web to its roots in collaboration and community, through collaborative journalism and Weblogs, Amazon-style customer reviews, and self-organizing portals. How does P2P and decentralization further this goal? P2P and Web services offer the potential to know exactly who is online when, thus enabling much stronger schemes for identity, authorization, collaboration, and community. The impacts are both utopian and Orwellian. Which vision will win out? And what are the paths to profitability for collaborative systems?
Distributed File Sharing
Napster took a simple idea--letting users keep their files on their own machines--added a naming scheme so that users would have unique identities regardless of their IP number, and the result was a system so powerful that only the full weight of the US copyright system could crush it. Which it did. But could the legal outcome of RIAA v. Napster actually be a good thing, the impetus to move P2P file-sharing from piracy to legitimate business models that reward artists as well as consumers?
Distributed Computation
SETI@home proved that unused cycles can be put to good use over the Net. But distributed computing startups are having trouble keeping the lights on as they try to turn this interesting concept into a paying business. What kinds of problems lend themselves to resource sharing? And where is the money?
Instant Messaging
Instant messaging is not only a hugely popular P2P application, it also suggests important new paths for peer-to-peer communication. Text-based chat is just the tip of the iceberg. IM's big breakthrough is in presence and identity management. IM systems know when you're online and when you're not, and thus when your system's resources can be exploited, when you can receive downloads (perhaps of that movie you've been dying to see, but perhaps of spyware you didn't even know existed.) In short, IM ties together distributed computing, filesharing, and other crucial P2P memes.
Search and Metadata
Many of the key opportunities in decentralized computing arise from understanding the role of directory-style services for connecting users. A core competency of most peer-to-peer systems is managing the metadata associated with files, resources, or services. How will frame-works like SOAP, UDDI, and .NET address the issue of Internet-aware programs using the services that are offered by other programs? What is XML's role in managing and routing data and services?