"Someone said, roughly, "applications don't run across groups of computers, they run on individual computers, while communicating with one another using protocols." Now this is perfectly true, but at a cost of obscuring some important effects.
The phrases "Neurons do the chemical work of the brain within the their individual cell walls, and communicate with one another using ions" or "Ants do the work of the colony, while communicating with one another using peromones" are also true in exactly the same way, but whatever the neurons are doing, they are not thinking, and whatever life cycle the ants have, it is not the life cycle of a colony....
I can make myself think of decentralization as a server-side email handling app running on Yahoo, plus thousands of individual email handling programs, plus still other programs that provide interfaces to that email (elm and telnet in my case, but it could also be Hotmail plus IE, etc), but to me mailing lists make most sense as applications that run on the internet. A mailing list is a dead simple app, to be sure, but one whose effects -- I can make a piece of writing appear on your computer -- make more sense to me thought of as an application running across machines than as a bag of server apps, client apps, and protocols.
Tim O'Reilly is the founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media, Inc., thought by many to be the best computer book publisher in the world. In addition to Foo Camps ("Friends of O'Reilly" Camps, which gave rise to the "un-conference" movement), O'Reilly Media also hosts conferences on technology topics, including the Web 2.0 Summit, the Web 2.0 Expo, the O'Reilly Open Source Convention, the Gov 2.0 Summit, and the Gov 2.0 Expo. Tim's blog, the O'Reilly Radar, "watches the alpha geeks" to determine emerging technology trends, and serves as a platform for advocacy about issues of importance to the technical community. Tim's long-term vision for his company is to change the world by spreading the knowledge of innovators. In addition to O'Reilly Media, Tim is a founder of Safari Books Online, a pioneering subscription service for accessing books online, and O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, an early-stage venture firm.
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