Instant Messaging v. File Sharing is an essay by Jack Rusher, published here Tuesday, February 04, 2003. It is part of Ideas, Big and Small.
Two great tastes, [...]
Instant Messaging systems, like AIM and Jabber, offer presence management services that can be used as a rendezvous system for distributed multiuser applications. One potential application is a peer to peer file sharing system built as an IM proxy layer; searches are propagated to one’s “buddies”, onward to their buddies, and ever outward into a web of trust via a friends of friends system — much the way people always have done it in the non-virtual world.
Aimster Ain’t the Answer
Aimster, now called Madster, is a service unto itself, designed to allow search and retrieval of content on the systems of other Madster users. Madster’s value add is the central indexing server, which widens the number of users a search can reach, increases the speed of searches and provides a single point of failure that is vulnerable to attack (physical, virtual or legal). What’s more, Madster’s users must pay a monthly access fee.
A small diagram illustrative of the text.
I propose a layer that allows a user’s requests to propagate into the tree-like network of that user’s buddies: Alice asks Bob and Charlie who then ask Dave, Edgar, Francis, Gregory and Helen, ultimately returning the information.
Islands in the ’Net
The proposed layer would not require a single centralized server. It would use whichever AIM or Jabber — or whatever — servers were already in use by a given circle of friends. This has the strong advantage of allowing any group of friends to set up their own servers, rather than relying on a single central server for all users. The improvement in robustness and privacy provided by this architecture is non-trivial.
Moreover, users who participate in multiple systems can serve as “bridges” for search traffic: Alice asks Charlie via a Jabber server that Charlie maintains, Charlie’s proxy forwards the request to Gregory via AIM and Gregory’s proxy sends the request to Francis via another Jabber server maintained by Helen. The query results follow the same circuitous path back to Alice who then sets up an out of band data transfer session with Francis.
This architecture would allow random users to set up non-public “islands in the network” while optionally using large scale public services, like AIM, as an additional communication bridging infrastructure.