{"id":454525,"date":"2010-03-21T08:54:28","date_gmt":"2010-03-21T12:54:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/newteevee.com\/?p=44248"},"modified":"2010-03-21T08:54:28","modified_gmt":"2010-03-21T12:54:28","slug":"happy-birthday-gnutella-pioneering-p2p-protocol-turns-ten","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/454525","title":{"rendered":"Happy Birthday, Gnutella: Pioneering P2P Protocol Turns Ten"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/newteevee.files.wordpress.com\/2010\/03\/happybirthdaygnutella.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\"  title=\"happybirthdaygnutella\" src=\"http:\/\/newteevee.files.wordpress.com\/2010\/03\/happybirthdaygnutella.jpg?w=210&#038;h=140\" alt=\"\" width=\"210\" height=\"140\" class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-44252\" \/><\/a>Ten years ago this week, online music pioneer <a href=\"http:\/\/blorp.com\/\" >Justin Frankel<\/a> released a  little application dubbed Gnutella that enabled file sharing through a  distributed P2P network. Frankel, whose previous claim to fame was  programming the then hugely-popular <a href=\"http:\/\/www.winamp.com\" >Winamp<\/a> MP3 player software,  supposedly named the client after his favorite hazelnut cream spread,  and <a href=\"http:\/\/tech.slashdot.org\/article.pl?sid=00\/03\/14\/0949234\" >the first version published online<\/a> was really more of a proof of  concept than anything else.<\/p>\n<p>Still, Gnutella hit a nerve. <a href=\"http:\/\/news.cnet.com\/2100-1023-234092.html\" >Napster had  been sued<\/a> three months before, and many file sharers were rightfully  fearing that the music industry would eventually prevail in court and  force Napster to switch off its servers. With Gnutella, no such switch  existed, as the client was allowing direct P2P connections without the  help of any centralized server. Add to it the fact that Gnutella, unlike  Napster, allowed users to swap videos and software as well as MP3s, and you  begin to see why many immediately viewed Gnutella as the next step in  P2P file sharing. <iframe src='http:\/\/digg.com\/api\/diggthis.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fdigg.com%2Ftech_news%2FHappy_Birthday_Gnutella_Pioneering_P2P_Protocol_Turns_Ten_2' height='82' width='55' frameborder='0' scrolling='no' style='float: right; margin-left: 10px; margin-bottom: 5px; padding: 4px 0 2px 4px; background: #fff;'><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><span id=\"more-107356\"><\/span>A step, one should add, that made Frankel&#8217;s employer AOL more than a  little nervous. It only took the Internet giant a day to force Frankel  and his colleagues <a href=\"http:\/\/archives.cnn.com\/2000\/TECH\/ptech\/03\/15\/gnutella\/index.html\" >to take down Gnutella<\/a> &#8211; but even that was too long,  as countless sites quickly started to first mirror, then build upon  Frankel&#8217;s official Gnutella client. There&#8217;s always been a little bit of  mystery surrounding the exact happenings of those days, but some people  have been musing that a person with a surprising amount of insider  knowledge showed up in one of the first IRC chat rooms dedicated to  Gnutella soon after AOL pulled the plug, only to provide some very  detailed information about the inner workings of the client&#8217;s P2P  protocol.<\/p>\n<p>Speaking of IRC: Early versions of the software didn&#8217;t  really have any way for users to connect, save for entering another  user&#8217;s IP address, which is why IRC quickly became an integral part of  the early days of Gnutella. It was also in those IRC chat rooms that the  myth of Gnutella as a seemingly invincible P2P protocol was born, and  the fact that AOL tried but couldn&#8217;t contain the software seemed to  fit right into that picture. Gnutella was one of the very first P2P  apps I ever wrote about, so I lurked in those chat rooms as well, where  people were cheering the fact that someone finally found a file sharing  solution that couldn&#8217;t be shut down. I still remember one IRC user  saying: &#8220;We&#8217;ve started a damn cult again!&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Only Gnutella wasn&#8217;t  really ready to be a cult. The network routed search requests from peer  to peer, leading to an exponential growth of traffic as its network  became bigger. Napster programmer Jordan Ritter described the problem  early on in a paper titled &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.darkridge.com\/~jpr5\/doc\/gnutella.html\" >Why Gnutella Can&#8217;t Scale. No, Really<\/a>,&#8221; and  Frankel himself, who has hardly ever gone on the record about Gnutella,  <a href=\"http:\/\/askjf.com\/index.php?q=83s\" >once stated<\/a> that he was fully aware of &#8220;how poorly it would scale&#8221; when  he released the client.<\/p>\n<p>Still, Gnutella captured the imagination of  many, one of them being Mark Gorton, founder of the New York-based  <a href=\"http:\/\/www.limegroup.com\" >Lime Group<\/a>. Gorton was at the time pursuing a vision of automating  businesses through structured data, and Gnutella, as something that could, for example, distribute  real estate listings wrapped in XML, seemed to fit that  image quite nicely. Early versions of the Gnutella client of Gorton&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.limewire.com\" >LimeWire<\/a> venture were  still written with this vision in mind, hoping to build a P2P network  that could eventually be used to do all kinds of things with which we&#8217;re now  familiar on the web, thanks to web services.<\/p>\n<p>LimeWire&#8217;s engineers  joined a growing group of developers loosely connected through web  sites like the long-defunct Gnutella.wego.com (whose admin Gene Kan <a href=\"http:\/\/www.wired.com\/culture\/lifestyle\/news\/2002\/07\/53704\" >tragically committed suicide<\/a> in 2002) and mailing lists like the  one for the <a href=\"http:\/\/groups.yahoo.com\/group\/the_gdf\/\" >Gnutella Developer Forum<\/a>, and one of the first issues to be  tackled was scalability. The introduction of a two-tiered system of  ordinary clients and so-called Ultrapeers helped grow both the  network as a whole and each user&#8217;s search horizon. The idea was also  later adopted by the developers of KaZaA, whose own take on this  two-tiered approach still lives on in Skype&#8217;s P2P network.<\/p>\n<p>Technical  improvements like these helped Gnutella to grow, but the competition  was quick to catch up. <a href=\"http:\/\/bramcohen.com\/\" >Bram Cohen<\/a> unveiled a first version of BitTorrent  only two years after Frankel had published Gnutella, and BitTorrent  quickly became the file sharing client of choice for sharing videos  online. Part of BitTorrent&#8217;s quick rise to fame was its modular  simplicity: Cohen had outsourced much of the search and indexing of  files to torrent web sites, only handling the actual distribution of  data within the client. Gnutella on the other hand was meant to work  without any web server. That made it much more invincible, but also much less  accessible to users who migrated from apps and clients to a  world of web services.<\/p>\n<p>Another issue that has plagued Gnutella  from the beginning is not technical, but legal. The protocol was  supposed to outsmart trigger-happy lawyers, but the mere fact that there  wasn&#8217;t a central switch to turn off the Gnutella network didn&#8217;t stop  rights holders from going after people and companies associated with it.  Lawsuits and legal threats <a href=\"http:\/\/www.p2p-blog.com\/item-884.html\" >forced Morpheus<\/a>, Xolox, Bearshare and a  number of other companies and developers to throw the towel.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.betanews.com\/article\/RIAA-Sues-LimeWire-Over-Piracy\/1154722015\" >LimeWire  got sued<\/a> by the music industry as well in 2006, but that hasn&#8217;t stopped  the company from continuing with the development and monetization of  its client. LimeWire&#8217;s client also utilizes BitTorrent these days, but  LimeWire&#8217;s VP of Product Management Jason Herskowitz told me during a  phone conversation that Gnutella has &#8220;worked really well&#8221; for the  company, and that its engineers are looking into ways to make Gnutella  once again more attractive to developers by exposing some of its  functionality through web services. &#8220;There is still a long future ahead  for Gnutella,&#8221; he predicted.<\/p>\n<p>Not everyone agrees with that  outlook. <a href=\"http:\/\/adamfisk.wordpress.com\/\" >Adam Fisk<\/a>, who was hired by LimeWire as one of its first  developers in the summer of 2000, but left the company in 2004 to  eventually start his own P2P venture dubbed <a href=\"http:\/\/www.littleshoot.com\/\" >Littleshot<\/a>, believes that  some core assumptions of the Gnutella protocol are outdated. &#8220;I don&#8217;t  think that distributed P2P search makes any sense,&#8221; he told me,  explaining that the very server-less search functionality that made  Gnutella superior to Napster also ended up being its biggest burden, and  that it would be much easier to have servers handle search and just use  P2P to deliver data &#8211; a recipe that has already helped BitTorrent succeed.<\/p>\n<p>Sure,  LimeWire and some other Gnutella clients could still stick around for a  long time, Fisk admitted, but he was skeptical that we would ever see  any significant new project based on Gnutella. &#8220;That would be shocking,&#8221;  he said.<\/p>\n<p><em>Photo <a href=\"http:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-sa\/2.0\/deed.en\" >courtesy of (CC BY-SA)<\/a> Flickr user <a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/sleepishly\/2656467632\/\" >Jessica\u00a0 Diamond<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><strong>Related content on GigaOm Pro:<\/strong> <a href=\"http:\/\/pro.gigaom.com\/2010\/01\/whats-next-for-the-cloud-distributed-architectures\/\">What\u2019s Next for the Cloud? Distributed Architectures<\/a> (subscription required)<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" alt=\"\" border=\"0\" src=\"http:\/\/stats.wordpress.com\/b.gif?host=gigaom.com&#038;blog=1149864&#038;post=107356&#038;subd=gigaom&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1\" \/><\/p>\n<div class=\"feedflare\">\n<a href=\"http:\/\/feeds.feedburner.com\/~ff\/OmMalik?a=sWAfAUkrBZo:oqReScFmTpM:yIl2AUoC8zA\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/feeds.feedburner.com\/~ff\/OmMalik?d=yIl2AUoC8zA\" border=\"0\"><\/img><\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/feeds.feedburner.com\/~ff\/OmMalik?a=sWAfAUkrBZo:oqReScFmTpM:V_sGLiPBpWU\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/feeds.feedburner.com\/~ff\/OmMalik?i=sWAfAUkrBZo:oqReScFmTpM:V_sGLiPBpWU\" border=\"0\"><\/img><\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/feeds.feedburner.com\/~ff\/OmMalik?a=sWAfAUkrBZo:oqReScFmTpM:F7zBnMyn0Lo\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/feeds.feedburner.com\/~ff\/OmMalik?i=sWAfAUkrBZo:oqReScFmTpM:F7zBnMyn0Lo\" border=\"0\"><\/img><\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/feeds.feedburner.com\/~ff\/OmMalik?a=sWAfAUkrBZo:oqReScFmTpM:qj6IDK7rITs\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/feeds.feedburner.com\/~ff\/OmMalik?d=qj6IDK7rITs\" border=\"0\"><\/img><\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/feeds.feedburner.com\/~ff\/OmMalik?a=sWAfAUkrBZo:oqReScFmTpM:D7DqB2pKExk\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/feeds.feedburner.com\/~ff\/OmMalik?i=sWAfAUkrBZo:oqReScFmTpM:D7DqB2pKExk\" border=\"0\"><\/img><\/a>\n<\/div>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/feeds.feedburner.com\/~r\/OmMalik\/~4\/sWAfAUkrBZo\" height=\"1\" width=\"1\"\/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Ten years ago this week, online music pioneer Justin Frankel released a little application dubbed Gnutella that enabled file sharing through a distributed P2P network. Frankel, whose previous claim to fame was programming the then hugely-popular Winamp MP3 player software, supposedly named the client after his favorite hazelnut cream spread, and the first version published [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2854,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-454525","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/454525","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2854"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=454525"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/454525\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=454525"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=454525"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=454525"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}