The P in P2P

Saturday, September 9, 2000 by Dave Winer.

Fall is coming 

Dear DaveNet readers, Y2K is starting wind down. The baseball season is going into the home stretch. The nights are getting cold, the sun is not so bright, and the days are getting shorter.

The days are getting shorter, and so are the DaveNets..

Here's a really short one that hits home, I hope.

Breathtaking 

The rush to P2P has been breathtaking. In July I decided to throw in the towel and go for it. P2P all the way! The concept is close enough to something I've been beating the drum about for several years, the Fractional Horsepower HTTP Server. Let's integrate writing tools with Web servers. We've done it here at UserLand, the software in beta now and the results are as stunning as I hoped they would be.

However, it's not about P2P, specifically, that people should be getting excited. It's the realization that there's a lot more than a dumb terminal and a dumb human at the end of the net connection.

As the Cluetrain guys say, we're not just eyeballs, we create stuff too. And today's PCs are powerful things, capable of doing much more than being an HTML browser and MP3 player. My machine is a 933Mhz honker with a 70+ gigabyte hard drive. A marvel of power, much of it untapped.

Intel is interested in this, and rightly so. What are the applications of P2P technology? Well believe it or not, I have the answer. Listen up.

The P in P2P 

The answer is right on the tip of Intel's nose.

What does Intel make?

Chips for PCs.

What does the P in PC stand for?

Personal.

So..

The killer app of P2P is..

People!

Finally 

Networking is going to get easy. Napster already showed us how. Don't just put a client on the desktop, put a server there too. What Napster doesn't give us are tools to create our own content. That's next.

Dave Winer

PS: Today I'm speaking at another music conference, MB5. Wish me luck!