Peer to peer - Napster, and ideas and software that followed in
its path. Two general families of ideas are called peer to peer:
decentralization and dark matter. Also known as P2P. - Computing
at the edges of the network. As participants in the web,
personal computers are mainly relegated to use as viewers of
data crunched elsewhere. For example, at Ebay the work of
matching buyers and sellers, of coordinating multiple bids, and
of creating the pages for display is all handled by a monolithic
data center; computers belonging to Ebay users only transmit
data to and from the data center, as well as render the data for
viewing in a browser. A peer to peer application like Freenet,
by contrast, has no data center whatsoever - all computing power
is contributed by users of the system - and even hybrid designs
like Napster put much more responsibility (and power) on the
computers of their users. Thanks to Clay Shirky for the phrase
"computing at the edges of the network".