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The Next Big Thing?
Peer-to-Peer Becomes a Popular Cyber Model
By Don Knapp
April 20 — Most computer users may not familiar with the term “P2P,” or peer-to-peer, but they probably know the name of the best-known P2P program: Napster.
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
Making Money Will It Be Addictive?
Despite legal problems, Napster has become the closely watched model for legions of would-be peer-to-peer developers and entrepreneurs. The peer-to-peer model distributes computing tasks among thousands, or even millions, of computers, which can cut costs and the time needed for projects that require a large amount of computer power.
In Napster’s case, users share access to music files via their personal computers.
Some non-profit organizations, like the American Cancer Society and the SETI Institute, which searches for alien life, are also using peer-to-peer to save money on research projects by accessing volunteers’ computers and using their computing power, while the computer owners are not using them.
Making Money
Plenty of companies on the Web are turning to P2P, but so far, few are making a profit. Not even Napster, which has 50 million users. As Napster struggles, P2P businesses are watching and hoping to learn from Napster’s lessons.
“Napster has mixed centralization and decentralization in a really canny way, to create what is obviously the most explosive peer-to-peer application on the Internet,” Clay Shirky, a partner with Accelerator Group, a digital investment group, explained at a recent conference devoted to the P2P model.
Shirky says Napster is not a pure P2P model, but a mix of peer-to-peer and centralized servers.
“You can think of it as chocolate and peanut butter. They’re both good. But better together,” he says.
Despite big user numbers generated by P2P firms, it’s difficult for them to profit from what is essentially free file sharing.
But still, someone is making money.
Will It Be Addictive?
Tim O’Reilly, of O’Reilly and Associates, which organized a P2P conference earlier this year, says Napster drives a large portion of the revenue in computer peripherals and CD drives.
And other computer companies say they hope to profit from the P2P revolution as well.
“We’re convinced people are going to be successful at [peer-to-peer],” says Bob Knighten, who directs P2P architecture in Intel’s microprocessor research lab. “We’re going to benefit, basically, because we provide the computational underpinnings.”
But for entrepreneurs, the question remains: how do they make P2P pay?
“Technology is often developed by people who have only a hazy idea of how they’re going to make money from it,” says O’Reilly. “Then there is somebody who says, hey, I’ve already got good revenue stream. This will become addictive.”
It’s not the entrepreneurs who are driving P2P development, says Shirky.
“I think people are seeing this and saying, ‘I don’t know how this is going to play out, I don’t know where this is going, but this is the most interesting thing going on right now, and I got to jump in,'” he said.
P2P正在成为最流行的互联网模式(英文) - belle - 2001-04-23 17:17:25
can you tell me where did you find this article?