Evolving the Internet The following was posted by [EMAIL PROTECTED] via the Jabber DevZone web site (http://dev.jabber.org/): Let's take a journey back in time... back in the early days of the World Wide Web when it was touted as a revolutionary new platform. There were visions of a future where everyone is a publisher as well as viewer, building a dynamic interconnected mesh of content from individuals and communities. Two of my favourite quotes from the creator of the WWW himself idealize these principles: "The World Wide Web was designed originally as an interactive world of shared information through which people could communicate with each other and with machines." (1) "I had (and still have) a dream that the web could be less of a television channel and more of an interactive sea of shared knowledge. I imagine it immersing us as a warm, friendly environment made of the things we and our friends have seen, heard, believe or have figured out." (2) Tim Berners-Lee All of this recent buzz around the Two-Way Web, P2P, and especially IM, seems to me to be a realization of the original dreams and goals that Tim had for the Web. So what happened and what can we do to make these visions a reality? What happened is pretty simple, it all has to do with identity. The Web was designed to identify content on a server, a server that had a name and could always be contacted from anywhere on the Internet. As the Internet grew, this system of identification failed to keep up to the ways in which applications and users were communicating on the Internet. This is illustrated very clearly by Clay Shirky in an article explaining P2P. Identity has become more complex as a result. Community web sites, personal home pages, email addresses, personal publishing/filesharing services, ecommerce accounts, and IM ids, all offering a different way of identifying people for different applications. Whenever there is an explosion in complexity, there is a business opportunity to take advantage of it and offer a service that hides that complexity for users. This is exactly what the three major portals are doing today, offering an identity service that is simple and unified. They have integrated lots of free services with identity on their network in an attempt to grow, lock in, and leverage their userbase (for advertising, commerce, content licensing, and lots of other purposes). They are building a business around this complexity and don't appear to be concerned about really fixing the problems causing it, in fact it's in their best interest to maintain or increase that complexity that users face on the Internet, they want the only solution available to a user to be their solution. You have to have an identity and participate in their network to access their content or communicate with their users. This is what Microsoft's Hailstorm is about, and what AOL and Yahoo are doing as well. This is fine and expected, but personally I am more interested in fixing the problem, I don't like complexity. I'd rather put my effort behind open platforms with decentralized identity. Again, Clay has articulated perfectly what the next steps must be to build these open platforms. We need to work together focusing first on simple interoperability, including Microsoft, AOL, Yahoo, and anyone else interested in fully realizing the original goals for the Web. Making a jump now to the technical side of interoperability, there are two important aspects of Jabber which may be a key to getting started: email-based user identity and discoverable server protocols (and of course XML, but that's a given). It's as simple as [EMAIL PROTECTED] currently being my email and IM, and could become my calendar, file sharing, personal web/xml server, vCard, address book, and the contact point for talking to any of my applications or devices (via SOAP/XML-RPC) wherever they may be. The 'jer' part could mean something different to all of the various separate systems, and the 'jabber.org' part could map to any software running on any box (see below). Email-based identity is not perfect, but it's well understood and allows anyone to easily operate their own server, associate themselves with a group, or use a service provider. What also makes a user@domain address so attractive is that it is very loosely coupled with the actual entities communicating on either end, allowing the domain to provide a transparent layer of abstraction that is critically important for building interoperability. It could be very easy for the major portals and other service providers to adopt, since they already offer an email form of identity and the architecture is very well understood (network map looks just like SMTP and POP/IMAP, or HTTP through a proxy). What if the Web had originally supported http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/content, where site.net would be responsible for locating user, and passing or redirecting the request for /content? Would it still be interesting to explore this for HTTP? The second and maybe even more important aspect is discoverable server protocols. If you have a user@domain based identity and are using it for some application, there needs to be a clear and precise way of determining if the domain supports your protocol and then mapping that domain to an IP. Thankfully, although not widely used yet, this exact problem was solved long ago and is a widely supported extension to the DNS: SRV (RFC 2052). It is essential to building interoperability solutions that any domains supporting a published inter-domain protocol advertise it's support using an SRV record. The use of SRV also has the built in benefits of allowing for flexible routing, load balancing, and port mapping. The whole point of the Jabber project has been interoperability around online conversations, we are simply a bunch of individuals collaborating to build a simple foundation that solves the problems and complexity we face. By keeping focused on what's important and persist forward by making sure all of our software and services can work together, we can overcome the barriers that have formed. I look forward to working with everyone in building the next generation of the Internet, and leave you with another quote from Tim: "Ants, Neurons, objects, particles, people. In each case, the whole operates only because the parts interoperate." http://jabber.org/?oid=787 _______________________________________________ jdev mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mailman.jabber.org/listinfo/jdev
