peer-to-peer: harnessing the power of disruptive technologies

1. If you are looking for a litmus test for peer-to-peer, this is it:
Does it allow for variable connectivity and temporary network addresses?
and does it give the nodes at the edges of the network significant autonomy?
If the anwer to both of those questions is yes, the application is peer-to-peer. If the answer to either question is no, it is not peer-to-peer -- Clay Shirky, the accelerator group

Users will not adopt peer-to-peer applications that embrace decentralization for decentralization's sake. Instead, they will adopt those applications that use just enough decentralization, in just the right way, to create novel functions or improve existing ones

The lesson of HTML's astonishing rise for anyone tyring to make sense of the social aspects of technology is simple: follow the users. Understand the theory, study the engineering, but most importantly, follow the adoption rate.

In the "Remaking the peer-to-peer meme" authored by Tim O'Reilly, he mentions Jabber and Groove both providing an XML routing infrastructure; and also claims that meta data management is very important in the namespace definitione of the peer-to-peer systems, for example, the current Napster only provides the simplest pair metadata including artist and song name; furthermoe, he writes that an open namespace with multiple providers will create a more powerful network than a closed one.

Any system that requires real-time group access or rapid searches through large sets of unique data will benefit from centralization in ways that will be difficult in peer-to-peer systems

Gnutella's route vs. broadcast