AllPeers Goes OP2Pen
I can't help feeling that P2P is so, well, you know, dotcom 1.0. And I must confess that I've never had the slightest urge to use the AllPeers Firefox extension, even though it sounds cool enough: when we set out to create our Drag-n-Share Firefox extension, we didn’t just take the most direct route to deploying the functionality we felt our users would want. We also built a powerful platform with features that could be used by many types of next-generation web applications: a generic resource framework, a scalable data store and of course a full-fledged peer-to-peer network. By baking the tricky bits into the browser platform, we hope that AllPeers will simplify the deployment of applications that work with structured data (like microformats), store this data where it makes the most sense (whether on the user’s machine or on a centralized server) and make real-time communication between users a snap.
But news that it has seen the light and is going open source is nonetheless highly welcome. It will be interesting to see how it develops as a result.