> Giving people and media items a fixed address at one location vastly > simplifies the problem of forming these groups and collections. It's > much harder to find other users and media items scattered across many > different sites than at one central site. (This is why we are building > VV!) And it's much harder to coordinate and update a collection > containing items scattered across many sites than at one central site. >
It seems to me this relates to the classic napster vs gnutella achitecture evaluation(?). The selling point of the distrubuted, decentralized nature of gnutella was, in the main, user privacy. Performance though, in my personal experience and from a system logistics point of view, was in napster's corner and I atrribute this to the directory residing on a centralized server. Though the files were distributed, queries were routed thru a central hub as opposed to decentralized nodes and thus the "path" between users was shortened. > Reed's Law argues that our media network must be a Group-Forming Network. > To form these groups, we have to link media items and people together > and to each other. As i explained in our IRC discussion, this is easy > to do if the database is centralized and very complicated otherwise. > Simpler from a system wide perspective in the case media, perhaps, but keep in mind that somebody's got to create and maintain the centralized db, associated code and/or the host itself; realistically with the kind of loving care and attention of a commercial venture (on call 24/7) precisely because of the centralized structure. If the central server goes down or lags, the whole thing grinds to a halt till somebody can find the time to troubleshoot and fix it. At least in the abstract(!), a decentralized "p2p" system could conceivably benefit from the redundancy of the query pathways between content "servers", shades of Arpanet, so that DeanSpace labor and resources might be directed towards the 5700 other things that need to be maintained, improved, added... Mind you I emphasize the above term "abstract" cause I have no idea precisely how such a system might be designed and implemented; gnutella based? Granted, the feasibility of an in place, functional and reliable distributed system may well prove the best argument for the ctralized option in the end. CMR <--enter gratuitous quotation that implies my profundity here-->
