To date, all the roundups and analyst reports on P2P have had a stilted, shoehorned feel. That's because the wrong metrics are used to categorize and evaluate P2P tech. On the one hand are the financial people, who distinguish among P2P offerings based on their markets and possibilities -- B2B, B2C, subscription, licenses, etc. On the other hand are technical people who divide up the world according to what the software is used *for*: file-sharing, instant messaging, distributed supercomputing, etc etc.

Doctorow believes both of these approaches are flawed, and miss the point entirely. The way to group and understand P2P offerings is to examine what makes them *cool*. In a Niftiness Hierarchy (NH), P2P companies might shake out like this:

• Exposing the Dark Matter of the Internet
  Letting the contents of the desktop be shared to the world, extending DNS to the desktop



• Doing an End-Run Around Sysadmins
  Puncturing firewalls and engaging in guerilla networking



• Foiling Censorship
  Storing and transferring files without restraint



• Letting Anyone Talk to Anyone
  Collaboration across the org chart, across the world



• Giving Anyone the Power to Compute Anything
  Cheapo renderfarms, big science gone dingo, homebrew biotech



• Letting Industrial Processes Proceed on Human Generated Routes
  Modeling industrial decision-making on TCP/IP: I know how to complete part of this task, I know what the task looks like when it's done, and I know who the next person in the chain is, but I don't know the whole thing.



• The Sheep that Shits Grass
  Solving Metcalfe's Paradox by allowing users to provision the resources they consume.



• Trust Through Topology
  Relay networks whose connections reflect trust: as with OC Folders, where self-organized topologies take the place of directories