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Sunday, June 24, 2001
Singing my P2P song...
Dan Gillmor: "Businesses are beginning to realize that ad-hocracies,
typically small groups, are the place where some of the most creative
thinking gets done. People out at the edges of organizations, communicating
with each other and their counterparts at other organizations, inevitably
find ways around corporate bureaucracies."
Jabber -- "The coolest IM system
on the planet"
"The heart of Jabber is a vibrant community of developers working
at the intersection of XML, presence, and real-time messaging. This
community is building an open technology framework that enables freedom
of communication among people, applications, and systems across all
platforms."
What can I do with Jabber?
So far you can use Jabber to talk with other people who are using Jabber
as well as with users of other IM services (see below). You can also
join IRC channels using Jabber. Before long you will be able to receive
news headlines and get other useful information through your Jabber
client, too.
Groove
THE END USER Napster for Ideas
Lee Dembart International Herald Tribune
Program Lets Users
Share Almost Everything Online
PARIS If you'd like to see one of the most amazing, powerful and revolutionary
applications of the Internet yet, run, don't walk, to Groove Networks
and download Groove (www.groove.net). This is the future of the Web.
Groove is a program that allows several people in different locations
to work together online at the same time, sharing files and pictures,
writing documents, surfing the Internet, drawing diagrams and even talking
to one another. Its power is breathtaking. What's more, it's free (at
least so far).
This is the next step in the World Wide Web. Until now, Internet users
have typically been passive recipients of stuff that's posted on Web sites.
Groove turns each user into a broadcaster as well as a receiver. It enables
two or more computers to hook up to one another directly and exchange
information in real time. It is Napster for data and ideas. In one sense,
it is what the Internet is all about.
Groove is the brainchild of Ray Ozzie, 45, who in the 1980s invented Lotus
Notes, which IBM ultimately bought for $3.5 billion. Lotus Notes allows
people in the same office to post messages and respond to one another,
a kind of electronic bulletin board. Groove expands that concept to the
entire world and adds many useful and valuable features. It is the embodiment
of peer-to-peer computing - dubbed P2P - which is the cutting edge of
the Internet.
The program works by creating space on each user's computer for the files
that are to be shared. When you invite other users into your "conversation
space," the program gives those users access to your space. The program
shows exactly the same display on each user's screen, and all the displays
change as each user makes changes to it.
Groove
and Ray Ozzie
Ozzie: More authority is being transferred to the edges of organizations.
Companies are a lot more responsive to their customers and to things
going on in their external environment.
Ray Ozzie, talking about Groove: "The tools that people are using
successfully at the edge of the organizations—e-mail and telephone—are
self-empowering tools. People don't have to ask somebody to make a phone
call; they just dial the number. People don't have to ask somebody to
set up an e-mail connection between them; they just send e-mail. From
their perspective, it's a peer system. If we wanted to enable people
out at the edge of the organization with some new type of communications
functionality, it had to be a self-empowering, spontaneous type of environment.
We don't view IT as the enemy or anything like that, but they couldn't
be in a responsive environment—you want to empower people to get
going without asking IT..."
Deconstructing
Groove from eLearningPost
Despite the NASDAQ downturn, a new technology trend is making its way
into pundits and technology vendors' hearts: peer-to-peer (P2P) computing.
The Gartner Group says P2P will “radically change business models.” Andy
Grove, chairman of Intel, calls P2P “a revolution that will change computing
as we know it.” And vendors such as Lotus, IBM and Hewlett-Packard are
rushing alongside Intel to build P2P applications. Yet this type of computing
and its repercussions on the IT community are still not understood by
many people.
How does P2P fit into the enterprise?
P2P proponents say that businesses can save billions by using distributed
computing setups that take advantage of unused bandwidth and resources.
Messaging tools and affinity communities can open up intellectual property
and data that are otherwise hidden in departmental offices and servers.
Now that knowledge management is such a big priority for so many companies
(80 percent of the world’s biggest are dabbling in KM, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers
and the Conference Board), businesses can reap benefits from P2P that
they don’t care to measure in dollars.
What problems do CIOs have with P2P?
Security remains one of the biggest issues. Because P2P is ad hoc and
decentralized in nature, IT departments can’t have the same level of centralized
control they have with client/server setups. This is where some P2P users
have introduced servers, so they can hold on to some central control,
as well as provide security for when users of messaging and affinity communities
can contact people outside the firewall. CIOs may want to consider further
security precautions, such as watermarking, which allows for authentication
of a given piece of software.
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