I attended the JXTA User Group meeting last week, and got a chance to hear about a really cool project called Paper Airplane. And to view some truly spectacular UI mockups while I was at it.
The project, headed by Brad Neuberg, is developing a user-friendly tool to allow people to publish content from the edge of the Internet. In its ideal form, Paper Airplane would incorporate distributed storage, relieving users from the need to run and maintain a web server or pay for bandwidth. It’s a truly revolutionary idea – if most of the knowledge is contained at the edge of the network, what better way to release that information and encourage innovation than to lower the technological barrier to sharing information? Paper Airplane was conceived with this purpose in mind: making it easy for people to create and share information.
That said, the ideal solution and the project’s current incarnation are quite different. Although the software will still achieve its primary purpose of allowing easy publishing, the more difficult elements of the implementation have been pared down. The lack of one of the most useful features of the original design, distributed network storage, means that end users will still need an “always on” connection to the net to allow their peer to serve content to other users.
In an ideal world, Paper Airplane would implement all of its original designs, plus more. For example, I’d really like to see this project try to provide a solution that co-exists more closely with the traditional web infrastructure. I envision a dynamic DNS-P2P bridge which would allow a user to enter a URL in a web browser and have the URL resolve to the IP address of a peer that could handle the request. This not only would allow individuals to publish content without running their own webserver, but also would allow the load for popular web sites to be distributed across their readership. For example, readers of a popular site like Slashdot could mirror the latest content on their local peer, reducing the load on the main website and solving what Neuberg affectionately terms the “tragedy of the dot-commons”.
I also got a chance to present an updated version of an idea I’d previously presented here. I’m hoping to put an updated paper together on the topic in the next couple of weeks, and join Neuberg in his quest to push the boundaries of information distribution to the edge of the Internet.