Interview With Lucas Gonze of Webjay

Richard MacManus writes "I've published an interview with Lucas Gonze, creator of the P2P music-sharing web app Webjay. Lucas was an early developer of peer-to-peer applications and back in 2000 he created a P2P start-up called World OS (the product was called Goa). In this interview we discuss World OS / Goa, how it compared to other P2P apps such as Gnutella, the 'Internet as Platform' concept, how Webjay works, some P2P History and Decentralization Theory, and ways around the legal hassles of P2P."

Re:Bit Torrent!

[Anonymous Coward]

BitTorrent is a form of P2P.

Re:How in the world...

[DanteBlack]

P2P is certainly more than a 'play thing' it has enormous potential for distribution. Take Debian for example, they use p2p to distribute install CDs (http://www.debian.org/CD/torrent-cd/), the benefit is that they've effectibly reduced the load on their servers. The problem with p2p is that it's gotten a bad rap, by large un-named organizations, not the technology proper.

Re:A side thought

[gordyf]

BitTorrent doesn't just use a "line". You download from multiple people simultaneously, and those peope change over time, so you're not just downloading from a single person. Also, the more you upload to others, the more you'll be favored when clients are choosing who to upload to.

Re:How in the world...

[Glass of Water]

Yeah, man, the basic principles of decentralization are still quite sound. I mean, how'd you get here? typing "66.35.250.150"?

The thing is, Webjay [webjay.org] (Gonze's current project, for those who skipped the article) isn't a decentralized service. It's a centralized index of audio from all over the net. It provides tools to aggregate disparate and far-flung audio into a single playlist, and lets users judge. It's pretty cool, actually, because it solves (or tries to solve) a big problem with online free music, which is that nobody wants to weed through the crap to find the good stuff.

WebJay isn't "p2p" (as in Napster, Kazaa, etc.)

[turnstyle]

For those unfamiliar with WebJay, it's worth pointing out that it's not an "app" (it's a Web site), and it's not "p2p" (at least not in the Napster, Kazaa sense of the term).

Instead, it lets you build and publish playlists that point to content served by other boxes -- it doesn't "share" anything as much as it shares pointers to those things (a big difference from conventional "p2p" apps).

Also, I believe Lucas' intent is that it only share authorized work (another big difference from conventional "p2p").