| Consider the different types of applications a user with a desktop computer may expect to use today. In addition to a Web browser and "office" productivity suite, desktop users expect functions for the following: Managing and sharing information Files, documents, photos, music, videos, and movies all want to be shared with business partners, friends, and colleagues. More advanced sharing enables one machine to act as a general task manager by collecting and aggregating results for example, Google.com is an example of distributed task-managing system. Gnutella is an example of a personal P2P file-sharing system. Collaboration Individual users find that address book, scheduler, chat and email software improves their productivity. Connecting the desktop productivity software together enables collaborative e-business communities to form for flexible, productive, and efficient working teams. For example, Java developers use OpenProjects.net to collaborate. On a broader scale, hundreds of thousands use instant messaging, which may be the most popular P2P application to date. Enterprise resource management Coordinating workflow processes within an organization leverages the existing infrastructure of networked desktop computer systems. For example, Groove enables an aerospace manufacturer to post job order requests to partner companies and route the completed requests from one department to the next. Distributed computation A natural extension of the Internet's philosophy of robustness through decentralization is to design peer-to-peer systems that send computing tasks to millions of servers, each one possibly also being a desktop computer. Although P2P is still in the "pioneering" stage, P2P applications have emerged to satisfy the needs of users for all of these functions. As the benefits of P2P are better understood, it's likely that many more applications will be built using P2P technologies. |
