Napster has shown the way to a peer-to-peer Internet. But first, P2P will change the way enterprises arrange and access information

Young Shawn Fanning made Napster to share his music files with friends. It turned into the hottest piece of software on the Internet, with millions of users sharing MP3 files—and attracting heavyweight lawsuits.

But it did more than shake up music distribution. It pointed to the future: a peer-to-peer service that increases the power of the Net many times over.

The Internet is powered by servers—which serve all that you see, access and download. This limits information: there are far fewer servers than clients or users, and someone has to maintain and update those servers. With Napster, the MP3 files are stored on the PCs of millions of users; the servers are merely directories, tracking what’s where. Go online and Napster on your PC informs a server what music you have. If you search for a song, the server looks up its current records to see which users have that song, and you can download from any of them. If someone requests a song you have, your PC becomes the server.

Today’s servers are not going to go away, either on the Internet or in the enterprise. They’re needed for their services, sheer power, specialized capabilities and storage management. But P2P has shown us the most powerful information search paradigm on the planet.

Take a 100-PC company. On the network are a few servers with some organized information and databases. But there’s a vast quantity of information on each of those 100 PCs. Contact databases, documents, cached or saved Web pages.… Imagine if you could do an instant search through every PC on your network?

Now extend this to a larger organization with hundreds of PCs, and you begin to realize the power P2P can unlock. Take it further to a whole city on a cable network, and you see where this is leading. On the entire Internet, imagine the power of being able to find information or a particular file on any PC on the planet.

Napster (napster.com) will stay the most popular service in 2001—as long as it stays alive. One problem: it does use servers—to store not the music, but the active directories. If these are shut down, Napster is down.

Gnutella, the biggest alternative, does not need servers at all. It’s a true P2P file-sharing system, nearly immune to "legal crackdowns". If Napster goes down, Gnutella will dominate in 2001. See gnutella.wego.com.

Other services: Imesh.com lets you exchange software and other files. It’s also easier to use than Gnutella, but has fewer users, so you’ll have limited file choices. Aimster.com lets users of AOL Instant Messenger (and now, ICQ too) exchange files using the Gnutella and Napster networks. DQ

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