It’s no secret that rVibe leverages p2p for delivering content and driving cost savings, and it should also be no surprise that we’re working to drive additional p2p support in our application. We’d like to get to full functional decentralization with only a centralized authentication and authorization index server, but I don’t think that’s likely any time soon (especially since high-performance distributed databases are still a thing of the future). That said, we’re currently exploring the balance between centralized (and therefore more reliably available) user functions versus client based delivery of functions (more scalable, but less reliable). The challenge (other than actually building the environment of course), is making sure users keep their computers on and rVibe running - and making sure functionality is available. And as much as I love consumers, they are not corporate data centers and might just turn their computers off. The worst case scenario is to browse into rVibe, see your friend’s user avatar, attempt to access it and have it say “sorry - (s)he’s not online right now.” Users would quickly abandon ship. You need to have the perception of availability. And if we want to go p2p, then we have to have real availability (we could cache stuff on regularly available computers, but I am not sure users will go for it. They might, but right now that’s a future strategy). So, I think that if we can offer some exciting functions to keep their computers on - then it will work more effectively. One of those function is receiving awards for uploads (of course). Another one of those functions will be streaming music directly from your computer (unless our lawyer stops us) to a browser for playback - aka placeshifting. Another will be some degree of remote management of your client (messages, etc). And here is the thing - driving the value of p2p is all about users keeping their computers running with rVibe. There has to be a perceived value to it. The question we’re trying to answer is - what else would be valuable to a consumer - valuable enough for them to keep the lights on?

Originally published on WordPress on August 07, 2007. Migrated to this blog on May 29, 2025.