P2P networks everywhere

A lot of people has said already that WebRTC and Peer-2-Peer comunications in the browser would be the next Internet revolution ("Internet 3.0", they call it), but I wouldn't suspect that this would start so soon: the next 7th April will be released PeerKit, the first WebRTC P2P enabled application (besides my P2P filesharing application :-P ), this case oriented as a distributed, zero cost Content Delivery Network. I don't know how effective or speed it would be (search a peer with the data, delegate the request...) and there's the problem of using the client connections to distribute the content (and with mobile phones connections this would be a serious problem), but don't doubt that if it works the server costs will drop abruptly world-wide... :-D

Slipping in the snowball

As you would know, I conceived originally ShareIt! as a real-time files-oriented PasteBin-like service using a WebSockets-based relay server (creating buzzwords the wild way :-P ). This was previously to known about WebRTC and DataChannels, that demostrated to be a way better aproach.

Obviously I wasn't the only want that saw this, and lately they are appearing a lot of other projects with a similar focus, like PeerJS, ShareFest (that recently got alpha status - congratulations! :-) ), OpenPeer or Drop&Load, and other related ones like DirtyShare, QuickShare or WhatAreYouDownloading. You could think about this that's a problem (too much related projects developed indepently and with their own incompatible protocols), and more taking in account that the WebRTC doesn't stop to being modified. What a mess! How something productive can be achieved with this perspective?

Obviously I wasn't the only want that saw this ;-) and that's the reason why in the latest weeks have been discussed to create a common P2P protocol that could make all this implementations compatible... and seems will be heavily influenced by ShareIt! 2.0 and WebP2P ideas :-D They agree on the point of split the handshake and the connection framework from the application specific protocols, so it could be easier to integrate with current protocols like Gnutella, and also it could be able to improve stability and versalite on the handshake servers (everybody is using custom ones, while it seems I'm just the only one that want to use generic third party channels... :-P).

Unluckily, I'm really busy lately with the classes up to the point I don't have time also for my work (I'll try to get up to date this spring week), so I believe I will not be able to do almost any progress on ShareIt! source code until summer, just reading others work on email. The good part is, by summer usable native DataChannels should be a reality... :-D

T3chFest Keynote

Finally, after two weeks while they were editing it, I've just received the video of the T3chFest presentation :-D


As you can see, the keynote was really well, without failures and a lot of question at the end (in fact I was almost the only one that got questions :-P ) although the limited time :-D Unluckily, I only got a third position. The reason? "It's not enought commercial, but you should think about develop it as a research project".

Taking in account that I was hearthly confident that I would get to start a company from ShareIt! and how is the situation of research on Spain, at a first point I toke the comment really bad, but on a second chance I though, isn't this was I always wanted? :-) To be honest, I've always wanted to work on R&D on my own projects, only that I need to pay the bills. That's the reason why I think that finally I'll do my career thesis with ShareIt! and work on it as an research project after that on my spare time (although it would be better to find a filantropist that believe in it! :-P ). In the last days I have been thinking about some interesting concepts for the next version of ShareIt! and WebP2P becoming them in a more general and ambitious project, and they'll need some attention and love to became true... :-)