-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On Fri, Jun 08, 2007 at 03:15:47PM -0700, Alex Harford wrote: > On 6/8/07, Peter Todd wrote: > > > > Other than filesharing, which is distributed for legal reasons, can you > > name a single distributed consumer-visible internet app that has come > > into fashion in the past 10 years? And by distributed, I mean with the > > architecture of email. > > Peter, I have to disagree with you here. We're all using a central > server for this list (piclist@mit.edu). I think that BitTorrent is > very much the equivalent here. If you know where to look > (http://torrent.fedoraproject.org/) you can access the BitTorrent > files directly. Perhaps I wasn't wording things right. What I was trying to get accross is more how services are increasingly tied to the inventors of the service, rather than the actual data involved, or at least where the data could be. It's more about how much easier it is to create a webservice, just write some code that goes on your server that you control. The user interface is standard HTML which has relatively few compatibility issues. But if you wanted to write the "next" email, and chat services come to mind, you suddenly have to write code to run on clients, which is a huge pain, even if you only want to support windows. There's no incentive, so you end up with piles of forums, or in the case of chat, deliberately proprietary stuff. The main thing is it used to be that someone wanted a new type of service, they'd write an RFC for it and an example client/server, and people would start implementing based on a standard. But the world is far too big and complex for that to work anymore. > I think that Distributed Version Control isn't quite here yet, but I > think it will become much more popular. Bram Cohen (creator of the > BitTorrent protocol) is working on one, Linus Torvalds (Linux kernel > creator) is working on one as well. A Wikipedia equivalent could sit > on top of this. Actually Linus isn't working on git anymore, maintainership has been handed over to someone else as git is very stable now. The kernel has been completely hosted by git for a few years now, I've got a copy of the Linux-2.6 branch myself. You're totally right though, many open source projects are transitioning to distributed rcs right now. Mozilla has switched to Murcurial for instance, darcs is really popular with smaller projects, pidgin has switched to monotone etc. As for a wiki... I think the technology is there, it's more the "social technology" that will be tough. How would reputations work? Spam? Heck, how do even package it the software to access it? Websites are easy, downloading software isn't. > > The "tag" in this case is the > > Maildir folder I've saved it to, but really, why shouldn't I be able to > > add a whole pile of tags to something? > > I have some gmail invites if you want... :D Where do you think I got the idea? :D Actually it was when I setup gmail domains for my brother, so his @iantodd.org email address could go via gmail, that the whole thing really came to mind. I'd have done it too for my domain, but then I'd be tied to gmail... - -- http://petertodd.org -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFGafeW3bMhDbI9xWQRAvsmAKCQrJ6TmcmqcY0N59vG9xeqIfgQawCeMzJh Rdk+9RxJo78G0/GdDB6bD28= =En65 -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist