Inside Talking About a Revolution or, What We Learned From a Napster Party
"We have seen the future of digital media and it is even scarier for the traditional media companies than their worst nightmares."

"The experience suggests that the looming combination of high-speed connectivity to American homes, ever-increasing desktop processing power and home data storage capacity plus peer-to-peer file sharing is more incendiary than we ever allowed ourselves to imagine. Because never again will we think of music, or eventually any cultural creation, as produced by a label, network or imprint, packaged, purchased and sitting on a shelf in our homes."

Wired News GPulp Opens Up Web Searches
"The Gnutella Next Generation development team announced on Friday that they are developing a new open source technology for search engines.

The group believes that "gPulp" (general Purpose Location Protocol) will eventually become the standard search tool on every network and computing device. "GPulp will be a ubiquitous, open, free, and powerful tool that lets users find anything –- anything! -- on any network," promised Gnutella Next Generation (Gnutella NG) team manager Sebastien Lambla."

""More and more, the big names of the computer industry, like Intel, recognize that peer-to-peer technology has a huge potential, and that it will change the landscape of the Internet industry. They will be interested in gPulp."

Dan Gillmor Dan Gillmor: P2P furor putting focus on profoundly important issue
"HYPE is a terrible thing to waste. Technology people, like politicians, take this notion famously to heart.

The latest evidence stems from the high-pitched furor surrounding the Napster music phenomenon. Napster is the poster child for what's known as ``peer-to-peer'' networking, or P2P -- Internet-based communication and collaboration that goes far beyond what we've known in the past.

The emergence of P2P in its latest forms also challenges, more convincingly than anything I've seen in a long time, the notion of ``network computing,'' where virtually all of the intelligence and data reside in centralized server computers. Network computing still makes sense in some ways, but it may become one of those technologies that sounded good but was eclipsed by progress before it took hold.

The P2P hype becomes annoying at times, however, especially when people attach the label to unrelated ideas. And it leads skeptics to ask whether we're into yet another craze like the "push technology'' mania that surfaced a few years ago and faded away under scrutiny.

Not this time. The furor over P2P in general, and Napster in particular, is actually useful. It has focused attention on something profoundly important."

redux [08.21.00]
Inside Human Nature 1, New Paradigm 0: On Gnutella, There Are Plenty of Files but not Enough Sharing
"Napster and other file-exchange services love to tout the virtues of sharing. But a digital world where most people are selfish and don't share files isn't just impolite, it could threaten the future viability of such peer-to-peer networks.

Raising profound issues, two researchers at the prominent Xerox Palo Alto Research Center published a paper on Gnutella last week. Their main discovery: 70 percent of users don't share any files and 76 percent share less than 10. According to research scientists Eytan Adar and Bernardo Huberman, this can lead to system blockages as the relatively few sharers are overwhelmed by file requests from freeloaders. With a few downloaders hogging the available bandwidth, it effectively blocks the majority of users from accessing the tiny pool of file providers.

More importantly, the study implies that copyright interests may have an easier time than suspected chasing down pirates."

Xerox Palo Alto Research Center: Internet Ecologies Area Free Riding on Gnutella
"An extensive analysis of user traffic on Gnutella shows a significant amount of free riding in the system. By sampling messages on the Gnutella network over a 24-hour period, we established that 70% of Gnutella users share no files, and 90% of the users answer no queries. Furthermore, we found out that free riding is distributed evenly between domains, so that no one group contributes significantly more than others, and that peers that volunteer to share files are not necessarily those who have desirable ones. We argue that free riding leads to degradation of the system performance and adds vulnerability to the system. If this trend continues copyright issues might become moot compared to the possible collapse of such systems."