I had some pretty interesting thoughts this evening while making a peanut butter and jelly sandwitch. I’m not quite sure how it started, but I like where it ended up.
What happens at the intersection of internet-ready mobile phones and peer to peer networks? Of course when the two technologies meet, whatever you end up wtih will be fully buzzword compliant. I’m trying to see past the buzz. Bear with me for a minute.
Cellular phones are finally beginning to have a decent bit of power, a real operating system, they are java-enabled, wap-enabled, and mms-enabled. Bandwith is still an issue but it is improving all the time. What if several peer to peer networks were developed to solve specific problems. Let’s take a peer to peer geographic-specific network. Everyone with a phone that is connected to the network is constantly broadcasting their location, and everyone recieves information about phones with in an n feet/mile/meter/kilometer range. You can query a phone within your radius, request a chat, meetup, collaboration, game, prank, or anything else you can imagine.
The only problem that I see to a system like this is bandwidth. Peer to peer networks are notorious bandwidth hogs. The thing I love about wireless/mobile p2p networks is that developers wound be required to write tight protocols and code to work on these limited devices. Another thing I was thinking about was the possibility of involving servers or gateways in this mobile p2p network. I’m pretty sure that with JXTA you can have different classes of nodes. It shouldn’t be too hard to set up server/proxy/gateway nodes and end user nodes. The phone deals with the gateway which broadcasts lots of bandwith and filters out anything beyond the radius specified by the phone.
The great thing is you could have a ton of different p2p networks that do things other than share music. You could share resources available to your phone, collections of user-taken photographs, expert information about a perticular location or topic, or anything else you can conjure up.
I see the advantages of a mobile mob of p2p networks outweighing the costs of building the infrastructure. I have a feeling that much of the work could be done for cheap and much of the load handled by broadband connections at home. How would that be for disruptive?
I think that this rant was probably triggered by the stuff that Russ said earlier today, so thanks Russ! I definately don’t have the time to tackle a project like this right now, but I’m going to throw it on the back burner and let it simmer. Any thoughts?