[JDEV] Jabber DevZone News - Evolving the Internet

[Jabber DevZone]

Evolving the Internet

The following was posted by jer at jabber.org via the Jabber DevZone web site (http://dev.jabber.org/):

Let's take a journey back in time... back in the early days of the
World Wide Web when it was touted as a revolutionary new platform. 
There were visions of a
future where everyone is a publisher as well as viewer, building a
dynamic interconnected mesh of content from individuals and
communities. Two of my favourite
quotes from the creator of the WWW himself idealize these principles:


"The World Wide Web was designed originally as an interactive world of
shared information through which people could communicate with each
other and with
machines." 
(1)

"I had (and still have) a dream that the web could be less of a
television channel and more of an interactive sea of shared knowledge.
I
imagine it immersing us as a warm, friendly environment made of the
things
we and our friends have seen, heard, believe or have figured out."
(2)

    Tim Berners-Lee


All of this recent buzz around the Two-Way Web, P2P, and especially
IM, seems to me to be a realization of the original dreams and goals
that Tim had for the
Web.  So what happened and what can we do to make these visions a
reality?

What happened is pretty simple, it all has to do with identity.  The
Web was designed to identify content on a server, a server that had a
name and could
always be contacted from anywhere on the Internet.  As the Internet
grew, this system of identification failed to keep up to the ways in
which applications and
users were communicating on the Internet. This is illustrated very
clearly by Clay Shirky in an article explaining P2P.

Identity has become more complex as a result.  Community web sites,
personal home pages, email addresses, personal publishing/filesharing
services, ecommerce
accounts, and IM ids, all offering a different way of identifying
people for different applications.  Whenever there is an explosion in
complexity, there is a
business opportunity to take advantage of it and offer a service that
hides that complexity for users.  

This is exactly what the three major portals are doing today, offering
an identity service that is simple and unified.  They have integrated
lots of free
services with identity on their network in an attempt to grow, lock
in, and leverage their userbase (for advertising, commerce, content
licensing, and lots of
other purposes).  They are building a business around this complexity
and don't appear to be concerned about really fixing the problems
causing it, in fact it's
in their best interest to maintain or increase that complexity that
users face on the Internet, they want the only solution available to a
user to be
their solution. You have to have an identity and participate in their
network to access their content or communicate with their users.  This
is what
Microsoft's Hailstorm is about, and what AOL and Yahoo are doing as
well.

This is fine and expected, but personally I am more interested in
fixing the problem, I don't like complexity.  I'd rather put my effort
behind open platforms
with decentralized identity.  Again, Clay has articulated perfectly
what the next
steps must be to build these open platforms.  We need to work together
focusing first on simple interoperability, including Microsoft, AOL,
Yahoo, and anyone else
interested in fully realizing the original goals for the Web.  Making
a jump now to the technical side of interoperability, there are two
important aspects of
Jabber which may be a key to getting started: email-based user
identity and discoverable server protocols (and of course XML, but
that's a given).

It's as simple as jer at jabber.org currently being my email and IM, and
could become my calendar, file sharing, personal web/xml server,
vCard, address book, and
the contact point for talking to any of my applications or devices
(via SOAP/XML-RPC) wherever they may be.  The 'jer' part could mean
something different to all
of the various separate systems, and the 'jabber.org' part could map
to any software running on any box (see below).  Email-based identity
is not perfect, but
it's well understood and allows anyone to easily operate their own
server, associate themselves with a group, or use a service provider.
What also makes a
user at domain address so attractive is that it is very loosely coupled
with the actual entities communicating on either end, allowing the
domain to provide a
transparent layer of abstraction that is critically important for
building interoperability.  It could be very easy for the major
portals and other service
providers to adopt, since they already offer an email form of identity
and the architecture is very well understood (network map looks just
like SMTP and
POP/IMAP, or HTTP through a proxy).  What if the Web had originally
supported http://user@site.net/content, where site.net would be
responsible for locating user,
and passing or redirecting the request for /content? Would it still be
interesting to explore this for HTTP?

The second and maybe even more important aspect is discoverable server
protocols.  If you have a user at domain based identity and are using it
for some
application, there needs to be a clear and precise way of determining
if the domain supports your protocol and then mapping that domain to
an IP.  Thankfully,
although not widely used yet, this exact problem was solved long ago
and is a widely supported extension to the DNS: SRV (RFC 2052).  It is
essential to building interoperability solutions that any domains
supporting a published
inter-domain protocol advertise it's support using an SRV record.  The
use of SRV also has the built in benefits of allowing for flexible
routing, load balancing,
and port mapping.

The whole point of the Jabber project has been interoperability around
online conversations, we are simply a bunch of individuals
collaborating to build a simple
foundation that solves the problems and complexity we face. By keeping
focused on what's important and persist forward by making sure all of
our software and
services can work together, we can overcome the barriers that have
formed.  I look forward to working with everyone in building the next
generation of the
Internet, and leave you with another quote from Tim:


"Ants, Neurons, objects, particles, people. In each case, the whole
operates only because the parts interoperate."


http://jabber.org/?oid=787