11/16/2004 10:31:00 AM

TP2P: Trusted Peer to Peer

We are moving at an ever hastening clip toward real, trusted P2P. Trusted P2P is about sharing digital files among friends and family. TP2P is a conceptual framework for digital tool sets that facilitate nuanced sharing of personally created content and the fair use of licensed work by enabling closed networks of trusted, distributed, direct sharing.

Aimster was an early, though centralized and flawed, example of this. Nullsoft's Waste was an even better example. iFolder is a newly open-source enterprise example of TP2P. Grouper is a new tool that tries to make TP2P an easy consumer experience, but kow-tows to the RIAA too much (if I can't share all file types your tool has no use to me). Downhill Battle's GAIM open-source P2P project looks interesting.

Ventures such as Shawn Fanning's SnoCap may or may not be of much use depending on the value they (or their licensees) provide to the customer. At this moment, from what can be known of their offering, all of the value that has been created is for the music industry.

The players with the power to reshape P2P into a widely adopted, legal consumer offering may be incumbents like Apple. If Apple was to create (or buy and rebrand) a system that fed off of the iTunes/iPod monopoly and allowed for open personal file sharing and fair use licensed file sharing they could be the major market legal P2P leader in a matter of months. Will they? Probably not anytime soon.

Personally, I have been playing with a SmartCommons-fed P2P application. I think that trusted P2P is the future and is especially compelling when coupled with a physical asset sharing system (digital and physical assets managed and shared the same way) and a nuanced social networking engine (to make the management and sharing of such assets useful and more likely).

Consumer TP2P is not here yet, but it is looming on the horizon.