AOL’s dark little secret

When AOL acquired Null­soft last year, it prob­a­bly didn’t expect them to develop soft­ware that wouldn’t fit the cor­po­rate line. How­ever, last week, all that change, with Nullsoft’s release of Gnutella. With the release of this lit­tle piece of soft­ware, AOL unwit­tingly became a Nap­ster com­peti­tor. What was sur­pris­ing about this was not only the fact that AOL was now sit­ting on both sides in the music copy­right bat­tle (AOL is about to acquire Time-Warner, one of the co-plaintiffs in the RIAA law­suit against Nap­ster) but also how quickly it reacted.

Unfor­tu­nately for them, it wasn’t quickly enough and tens of thou­sands of peo­ple got their hands on the soft­ware and started redis­trib­ut­ing it. While it will most cer­tainly be used for steal­ing copy­righted mate­r­ial, this cat­e­gory of soft­ware inter­ested me at first because of the index­ing tech­nol­ogy that was built in them. One of the great thing they do is index the files on your sys­tem and make them avail­able to every­body else who’s con­nected to the same server as you are (in Napster’s case) or to the net­work in gen­eral. This could be sig­nif­i­cant if you were to build a search engine.

Imag­ine search engine soft­ware that would be installed on every web server out there. Not only would it index the pages for the server admin­is­tra­tor, but it could also report back to a main­stream search engine. Many stud­ies have now come out about most of the large search engines (Ink­tomi, alltheweb, Google, etc…) only man­ag­ing to index a frac­tion of the web. With a ser­vice à la Gnutella, you could have every web site call back the search engine direc­tory to post the changes they had. This could hap­pen through­out the day and might work bet­ter than the spi­der tech­nol­ogy cur­rently being used by most search engines.

The other poten­tial use for tools like Gnutella is as a mass cor­po­rate coöper­a­tion tools. Right now, when you fire off Gnutella, it con­nects to Gnutel­lanet, or pretty much any­one who’s using Gnutella at the time. As I just checked on it, there are 700 peo­ple con­nected. There is no cen­tral source or server, which means that a tool like Gnutella could be used to share files with­out hav­ing to worry about a cen­tral server go down.

For years Sun has been claim­ing that the net­work is the com­puter. With a tool like GNUtella my hard drive can be become a por­tion of a larger hard drive. I could have a mar­ket­ing hard drive, a finance hard drive, a HR hard drive of which only a por­tion would be sit­ting on my com­puter. Com­pare this to cur­rent cor­po­rate client-server sys­tems where you have to delib­er­ately save a file to the cor­po­rate server as well as to your hard drive if you are trav­el­ing… for­get to save it to one or the other, and you’ll be stuck with­out your work or some­body else’s later revi­sion. With a GNUtella like sys­tem, YOU would con­tin­u­ally have the most updated ver­sions of the files YOU author, with­out hav­ing to remem­ber to sep­a­rately save them.

At the same time, how­ever, it seems to be lack­ing in a cou­ple of crit­i­cal areas: first of all, Gnutella could do with some sort of an authen­ti­ca­tion mech­a­nism. That way, I would be able to cre­ate pro­files and give access to cer­tain files to cer­tain peo­ple. For exam­ple, I would be able to mark a spread­sheet as acces­si­ble to the finance depart­ment while I would have a pow­er­point pre­sen­ta­tion acces­si­ble to the mar­ket­ing folks. The poten­tials are endless.

While Gnutella is con­sid­ered a major threat to the music and movie indus­try, it is those cor­po­rate uses that inter­est me. I believe that, in the long run, those tools will make their way in cor­po­rate Amer­ica and not just because some­one wants to down­load the lat­est ver­sion of Santana’s new album or Julia Roberts’ new movie.