Excellent lecture. IMO Napster succeeded not just because of the music, it also had chat enabled which created community. I made RL friendships that I still maintain from seeing who was grabbing what from my hard drive and sparking up conversations.

Hey Mark, Great lecture - thanks for sharing.

One slight innacuracy was with the timeline of Gnutella - but it's really just being picky :)

Gnutella was released without source, and within a day or so AOL shut it down (it had a central peer finder).

Folks started colaborating on IRC (#gnutella on EFNet) to find other Gnutella peers.

Shortly thereafter the protocol was reverse engineered, documented, and shared.

Some time later (weeks/months) the Gnutella "source code" was released - possibly on a newsgroup, but my memory on that detail is hazy.

But by that time it was all reverse engineered, and patched versions of Gnutella were already out.

- Will

"In my days, peer to peer involved finding a node on an IRC Channel and waiting for ages for query results!"

Thanks for sharing!

Thanks for Sharing Mark. See you at CU09!