On Thu, 2006-11-09 at 13:55 +0000, Tien Tuan Anh Dinh wrote: > He explained why Jabber, ICQ and Napster are P2P. I agree. But i am not > convinced by his explanation of Email not being P2P!!!: "if you drop AOL > in favor of another ISP, your AOL email address disappears as well, > because it hangs off DNS". Isn't an email address not much different > from your nickname on Jabber, ICQ or any other IM systems ? How about > web-based email ? I didn't see any violation of the two properties > stated above: users can of course leave the network at will, and he can > do anything he wants with his Pc. > > Please could anyone point out my misunderstanding here.
You are not misunderstanding. Mr. Shirky is either classifying by culture and claiming he's classifying by technology, or he's not properly classifying the technologies. Email is no less P2P than Jabber is. The differences between Jabber and email are small and can be summed up in a few sentences. Jabber has the expectation that the store and forward cycle will be fractions of a second instead of minutes like email. To facilitate this instant delivery expectation a Jabber client is expected to remain constantly connected to the server and asynchronously accept delivery of messages instead of periodically connecting and polling for new messages. Jabber also has presence information, but that's just a special class of message that can be sent by the server on behalf of the client without the client explicitly asking. Those are the differences between Jabber and email from a technical perspective if you're using POP. Have fun (if at all possible), -- The best we can hope for concerning the people at large is that they be properly armed. -- Alexander Hamilton -- Eric Hopper ([EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.omnifarious.org/~hopper) --
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