So many ideas and so many technologies are swirling around P2P -- decentralization, distributed computing, web services, JXTA, UDDI, SOAP -- that its sometimes hard to see order in the chaos. If we look past the labels and the individual applications, though, we can see one thing clearly: The twin revolutions of the PC and the internet collided in 1994, and for half a dozen years after, browser+server was the indispensible internet architecture.

Today, we are witnessing a Great Re-wiring, a chance to reconsider how the world's devices connect to the internet and to one another outside the browser+server framework, and no matter what label we choose for it, this re-wiring is transforming the network and how we use it.