A Developer in the DMZ

Tue, Feb 20, 2001; by Lindsey Smith.

Dave Winer made an interesting statement today (2/20/01) in his weblog.

"Imagine a room, a cocktail party. It's a three-cornered room. In one corner is Jim Allchin. In another corner is Eric Raymond, and in the third corner is Bill Joy. In the middle are thousands of random developers, working every day to create cool shit for users, hoping to Hit It Big like the Napster guys (see below). Jim and Eric and Bill are talking about each other. Pointing fingers. Talking about guns, and battlefields and death. They don't actually have the courage to fight each other, they just like to talk about it. The reporters, outside the room, ignore the thousands of developers. Look, everyone's fighting! the headlines scream. A battle to the death. A demilitarized zone. Guns pointed everywhere. But the developers don't have guns, they just have compilers and text editors, servers and browsers. They're busy building cool shit for the reporters to use. Somehow this is overlooked."

This pretty much summed up a feeling I had at last week's O'Reilly P2P Conference which a group of us from Thinkstream attended. Of course this new Allchin/Raymond/Joy Battle Royale received plenty of press attention, which in the zero-sum-game of the conference diverted much needed attention away from the anonymous little companies innovating in the P2P space.

I've spent an awful lot of time in the past several months talking with other P2P companies trying to learn what they're up to. Day in and day out, I'm STILL amazed at the great new ideas I'm hearing. P2P will definitely change the way things are done on the Internet, but in ways the casual observer may not yet realize. Many of those casual observers say things like this and this.

What they don't seem to realize is that P2P != Napster. Or that P2P != Groove. This media mentality only serves to further obscure the countless startups that are innovating in those space, but couldn't be farther from Napster and Groove.

So while we're working harder to differentiate ourselves in front of the world, Microsoft/Sun/Open Source Movement open of a new front in their old war. Of course, I don't expect them to stop fighting. I just wish they would move their battlefield somewhere else.

And now I await with baited breath the coming press release (and corresponding press fervor) from Microsoft|Sun about .NET|Sun 1 that declares P2P "over"...

Now that I've vented a bit, allow me to plug my company, Thinkstream, a bit.

Thinkstream is a small (25 employee) startup focused on solving the problems that centralized search architectures often have: dead links, inability to keep up with rapidly-created content, inability to effectively handle dynamic, data-driven information sources and inability to manage wide varieties of information types.

We've spent the last 3 years building a Distributed Information and Commerce Infrastructure that allows us to pursue two basic businesses.

First, the infrastructure enables us to solve problems where centralized architectures have failed, whether because there is too much information, too many information sources, the information changes too quickly or there are too many disparate information types. We are currently exploring licensing deals for the infrastructure in the corporate information, B2B and B2C realms.

Second, we've built an application on top of our infrastructure, Tadaaa. Tadaaa has two main parts. First is a peer-to-peer consumer e-commerce shopping network that generates revenue through an affiliate model. Second, is community-of-interest information sharing network that gives peer-to-peer access to content stored in web servers, desktop PCs and databases.

Tadaaa is a first-of-its-kind network that allows both corporate and individual content to be searched, live and in real-time, as an organized, unified whole. Tadaaa is focused on opening the Ivisible Web, which not only includes public corporate content locked up in databases, but also content that resides on the desktop as well. Tadaaa is capable of giving access to far greater amounts of content and will dwarf the amount available from existing search portals. Tadaaa will generate revenue through community sponsorships and through affiliate commerce as well.