O'Reilly Digital Media

Related link: http://www.gonze.com/index.cgi/2003/06/01#wastenotes

• Web home for WASTE: I’ve gotten a bunch of queries about WASTE, generally with a focus on user
  problems like how to get a connection or FAQ issues like how to build on OS X. To help people to help each other, as well as to foster discussion of technical issues related to WASTE, I have created a mailing list and web home at Yahoo! Groups.
• Spin control successful: the New York Times adopted the argument that WASTE is IM. Hopefully this means that we won’t have yet another wave of paranoia about P2P.
• Where’s the OS X version? Is it really possible that it’s been almost a week without an OS X port running?

The early reaction to WASTE is that it’s yet another filesharing tool, and that’s wrong in a way that matters.

The reason that WASTE is not a filesharing tool is that it doesn’t support searching in any meaningful way. Under the hood, Kazaa et al are nothing but search engines, while WASTE clusters are too small for search. A real cluster would be 5-10 people, not even the 50 given by developers as the maximum size, and at that scale searching is pointless.

WASTE is a tool for chat and IRC, with no more or less suport for filesharing than AIM. Indeed, this is a very good reason for AOL to come down hard on the project. AOL’s strategic leverage is that it has the largest base of instant messaging users, and hence is the easiest way to reach somebody over instant messaging. WASTE not only ignores the AOL Instant Messenger namespace, it sets up a new namespace, and the decentralized nature of that namespace means that
no provider — not Jabber, not MSN/Passport, not even AOL/Nullsoft — can get a strategic edge. If the WASTE namespace were to to take off, the new mega-namespace established by the Microsoft/AOL truce would be obsolete.

WASTE is scorched earth for AIM.

As with a lot of P2P, WASTE represents scorched earth for companies that want to own a namespace. If you want to use centralized IM, you have to pass ownership of your IM identity to a service provider like AIM or Passport. But if you don’t want to talk to everybody in the world, just the few that you actually know, and the overhead to whitelist your friends is low relative to the length of time that you’ll stay in contact with them, there’s no reason for identity service providers. In WASTE, nobody owns your identity but you.

WASTE also bypasses much of the need for presence providers to interconnect people behind firewalls. If any member of a WASTE cluster is not behind a firewall, messages are passed through that node. In my WASTE cluster, for example, there has always been at least one node not behind a firewall. There has always been at least one broadband node, and there’s no incentive to be a free rider, since clusters are formed around meatspace relationships. Most people are happy to help out their friends, as long as it isn’t too much of an inconvenience.

WASTE is nothing new.

Gnutella was fundamentally new in that it gave slacker developers a way into autonomous networks, which were ivory tower stuff at the time. WASTE introduces no new ideas — everything in it has been shipped already in Groove, and WASTE is missing a lot of things that Groove has.

The only thing new about WASTE is that it works. Groove is too bloated for normal use. If you need Groove’s quality of service, security, and replication, there is no competition. If you don’t need all that you’re better off with WASTE. Fair enough: Groove is for enterprise workgroups, WASTE is for friendnets. WASTE is worse. Which is better.

TODO

There are two big things that could be improved.

1. It’s not worse enough. There’s still a bunch of junk that can be factored out — we’ll know it can get no smaller when there’s a Javascript version. The Unix console code doesn’t have a bunch of functionality, but it works, and console versions imply good things about simplicity. Still, there are console versions of SOAP, so that by itself doesn’t prove anything.
2. Poor support for transitive relationships. You automatically get a connection to a friend of a friend, and after that, friends-of-friends are treated the same as friends themselves. That’s not good enough. There needs to be a way to keep introducers in the middle, so that names and bytes continue to be vouched for and guaranteed by the introducer.

Related link: http://www.archive.org/bookmobile/

COMPUTER SYSTEMS LABORATORY COLLOQUIUM
4:15PM, Wednesday, May 21, 2003

NEC Auditorium, Gates Computer Science Building B03

http://ee380.stanford.edu[1]

Topic: The Internet Bookmobile:
Public Access to Publishing

Speaker: Ashley Rindsberg
Internet Archive[2]

About the talk:

The Internet Bookmobile provides a community-based means for achieving greater access to written knowledge, by enabling nearly anybody to print public domain and self-published works in small quantities at very low cost.

The Bookmobile applies well-entrenched technologies like laptop computers, office printers, and scanners to both scan and print books that are important to underserved domestic and international communities. In this way, it is able to provide a means of distribution for texts that have remained obscure by publishing them on the web, thereby making the material universally available.

See also:

http://www.venturecollective.org/bookmobile[3]

http://www.archive.org/bookmobile[4]

About the speaker:

Ashley Rindsberg is a graduate of Cornell University where he earned a B.A. in Philosophy and a B.A. in Science and Technology Studies, focusing on the Philosophy of Science and Innovation Theory. In 2001, he began working with the History of Recent Science and Technology Project at MIT’s Dibner Institute to digitize the paper-copy archive at the Cornell Center for Materials Science.

He has taught and tutored writing and has a deep interest in literature. Currently he is developing and piloting the Internet Archive’s Internet Bookmobile in San Francisco.

Contact information:

Ashley Rindsberg

The Presidio of San Francisco

116 Sheridan Avenue

San Francisco, CA 94129

415-561-6767

ashleyr@archive.org[5]

Embedded Links:

[ 1 ] http://ee380.stanford.edu

[ 2 ] http://www.archive.org

[ 3 ] http://www.venturecollective.org/bookmobile

[ 4 ] http://www.archive.org/bookmobile

[ 5 ] mailto:ashleyr@archive.org

I just came across an article that talks about the future rollout of wireless networks and how generating profits from these networks is still unclear. This just goes to prove that our esteemed cult leader Clay Shirky is once again on to something — in his easay Customer-owned Networks: ZapMail and the Telecommunications Industry he delves into the details of how fax machines are a product, not a service:

First of all, Federal Express didn’t get that faxing was a product, not a service. FedEx understood that faxing would be cheaper than physical delivery. What they missed, however, was that their customers understood this too. The important business decision wasn’t when to pay for individual faxes, as the ZapMail model assumed, but rather when to buy a fax machine. The service was enabled by the device, and the business opportunity was in selling the devices.

He goes on to elaborate how wireless networks are the same deal as fax machines were. And it makes sense — its amazing how cheaply a wireless hotspot can be setup. Lets say that your local non-chain coffee shop wants to setup a hot-spot — a DSL connection and a wireless router is all it takes — and that is less than $500 up-front. The $50 - $100 monthly cost to pay for the service can be covered pretty easily by asking the customers who use the network to donate $1. Not charging for a service will make some people so happy that they will drop more than $1 in the donation box. And, having a free hot-spot will also increase the traffic to your coffee shop, and that alone can go a ways to offsetting the cost to provide the hot-spot.

(Tangent: A few weeks ago I was trying to kill a few hours downtown Palo Alto, and the kind folks at Starbucks informed me that I needed a T-Mobile account to access their wireless network. Not having a T-Mobile account, I walked out purchasing nothing. Two blocks down the street was a local coffeshop with wireless access, and they didn’t charge anything. I was so happy, and I went an bought $10 worth of coffee and pastries. More than I was willing to spend at Starbucks.)

I think that wireless networks are inherently community oriented. Good will and a few bucks here and there will have much more impact than rollouts of massive for-profit networks. Random people in neighborhoods of the cities will take it upon themselves to provide network access for the people in the streets below, much in the same way that the Open Source community loves hacking on code without getting paid for it. And as Napster has shown, FREE is hard to compete with.

Thus, the profits for wireless networks are elusive. Good! I think the community itself can provide a better service and at the right price than some draconian corporation who wants to suck on your credit card. Plus with municipalities getting in on the wireless game, its going to be even harder for the wireless corporations to turn a buck.

I think business owners should consider wireless networks more of a loss-leader rather than a source of revenue.

Do you think the wireless service providers are going to make a buck?