At 09:26 AM 3/23/2002 +0100, Anonymous wrote: >As far as the economics, one of the main lessons of the failure of Mojo >Nation was that Mojo didn't work, or perhaps you might say it worked too >well. It caused nothing but problems for the operators of the network. >People tried to horde it, they got upset when they were losing Mojo, >they would cheat and steal to get more. MN steadily downplayed the >importance of Mojo over the life of the project, making it harder to see >how much you had, decreasing its importance in terms of getting data, etc. >Eventually it was practically invisible.
I think the Mojo hoarding and cheating was a relatively small problem. I think it was an excellent idea, but should not have been introduced until the system reached a critical mass. The key reasons for MN's failure: lack of stability and data retention and lack of automated meta-data generation from file headers (esp. .mp3). The first problem caused users to have to manually and constantly refresh lost blocks (an automated client missing block search and refresh function would have been a god send, and something along these lines was planned for a disk/data backup service but that never happened). The second kept many potential new users from joining when the saw how difficult MN was to use compared to Napster. >Unfortunately many of the programmer types who have been pushing P2P >development also happen to be libertarians. Their sad faith in that >ancient religion prevents them from learning from experience. They see >everything through the distorting prism of their ideology. If people >are going to learn from the successes and failures of the past, they >must have clear vision and the courage to look beyond the circumscribed >boundaries imposed by their political beliefs. Not all. Someone has to pay for the resources provided and the system must not encourage too much freeloading. > > btw I've noticed while looking around at storage-surface web pages > > recently while writing the above that it would seem that some are > > showing signs of gearing up for commercial backing. > > eg. http://www.intermemory.org -- I'm pretty sure that used to look > > more research oriented and it's now looking quite corporate. Also the > > interest from commercial vendors like micrsoft who has their own > > farsite project: http://www.research.microsoft.com/sn/Farsite/ > >Apparently you didn't notice but there was a huge influx of commercial >money flowing into P2P starting about two years ago. Everyone wanted >to be the next Napster, forgetting or ignoring that Napster never made >any money. P2P is actually yesterday's news now. The money is quickly >evaporating and it will be left to the hobbyists, i.e., us. We shall see. steve
