Tag: P2P

Web sites on a Desktop?

At Scripting News, David Winer keeps saying he wants to see web sites on the desktop,

Last night talking with Brent about the scaling wall that Pyra is climbing I said what they should do is Blogger On The Desktop. Then everyone using Blogger could add their computer to the mix. Decentralization and P2P all the way. I’ve got to write an essay about this. Maybe in a few minutes. Desktop websites. It’s the cure for Dotcom Disease.

I hope he writes his essay soon because I have no idea what he’s talking about there. After all there are already a number of website on the desktop products. Dreamweaver will let do a nice web site on your desktop and then handle uploading it to an FTP site automatically.

Too complex? A tool such as Trellix does an excellent job of simplifying the process (or even Winer’s Radio Userland, which is impressive).

If Winer means actually serving pages from the desktop as well, that opens up a whole can of worms that I don’t think the average person using Blogger or a similar service wants to deal with.

Which brings me to the problems that Blogger is having raising money. Its venture capital partners decided not to offer additional funding, so Pyra is appealing for its users to donate money to buy new servers. New servers are needed because the service is slow in general, and more resources will be needed to launch the fee-based pro version of Blogger.

If I were a Blogger user, however, I might be concerned about Pyra’s long term ability to reach profitability. The market it is entering with its fee-based system is already getting pretty crowded and Blogger has an extremely narrow focus. I’m using Conversant to manage this web site, but if I weren’t and I wanted a solution that was going to cost real money, I’d opt for using something like Trellix, a hosted Manila site or even one of hosts that offers Slashcode before I’d go with Blogger.

Groovin’

At least from where I am on the net, I’ve had a hard time reaching the Groove Networks site most of the day (at least at reasonable speeds). Anyway, Jon Udell has an interview with Groove Networks founder Ray Ozzie, How Ray Ozzie Got His Groove Back. To quote,

Jon: If the objective is secure, yet spontaneous, collaboration that can work within and across corporate borders, Groove beats e-mail hands down — assuming everybody you need to communicate with runs Groove. The aim, of course, is to make Groove ubiquitous. But for the foreseeable future, it’s going to continue to be e-mail that makes the world go round. Groove can use e-mail as the vector for an invitation into a shared space, but otherwise doesn’t facilitate communication among mixed groups of Groove and non-Groove users. How can Groove best co-exist with the current e-mail habit, while at the same time reforming that habit?

Ray: As you are subtly implying, the best co-existence strategy is one of integration. And, as you say, this is specifically why we’ve embraced e-mail as a key mechanism for invitation into Groove shared spaces. That said, two mechanisms are available — albeit currently in prototype form — that will assist in bringing e-mail-based users into collaboration with Groove shared space users. As Groove matures over the upcoming months, we plan on integrating more and more of this level of function into our base tools.

First, it’s possible to send e-mail directly into a shared space (through a Relay Server) — provided an appropriate method of addressing the e-mail, and a cooperating tool within the shared space. Thus, e-mail users will be able to, in essence, send or “cc” e-mail directly to a group of users sharing a Groove shared space.

Second, if designed to do so, it’s a trivial exercise for a tool implementor to send a copy of shared-space activity to one or more external e-mail users, provided that they can format the content and activities in an appropriate way for the medium. Specifically, it’s easy to copy messages (e.g., discussion items and documents) to e-mail users. It is a bit more challenging to understand how one might copy sketchpad strokes, changes to outline items, or chess moves to e-mail-based participants.

Two comments:

1. The comment about chess moves is a bit perplexing given that there are literally dozens of programs designed specifically to communicate chess moves via e-mail. This would seem like a relatively straightforward and trivial problem to solve, not one that is especially challenging.

2. For some reason Udell doesn’t ask the interesting question — invitations and maybe part of the “shared-space activity” can be sent out via e-mail, but can someone restricted to e-mail send information back into the shared space?

From what I’ve read of Groove, it seems very interesting, but I hope the system can fully accomodate using e-mail as IMO it is the single most important tool in collaboration, and is almost certainly going to be so for the forseeable future (in fact barring ubiquitous extremely high speed Internet connections, I have difficulties envisioning any tool surpassing the usefulness of e-mail).