Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Broadband Apps (was Re: Bandwidth Being Solved?)

Author:Paul Snively
Posted:9/13/2000; 10:47:29 AM
Topic:It's p-to-p plus applications, stupid
Msg #:21302 (In response to 21292)
Prev/Next:21301 / 21303

Erik L. Neu: However, adoption has been a little slower than I would have thought. In my affluent suburban neighborhood of 50 houses, it has been available for 1 year, and I only know of 2 of us who have cable.

I second the emotion. In Venice, California—very much part of extremely affluent "West L.A." in general—I believe I'm the only DSL subscriber in our neighborhood.

Frankly, I think part of the problem is that no one's quite sure yet what to do with the bandwidth apart from watching higher-quality porn (er, that is, being able to watch porn with higher production values, not that the porn itself somehow automagically got improved by being shoved through a DSL filter)! DSL/Cable bandwidth applications suffer from the classic chicken-and-egg problem: no apps until the bandwidth is widespread; no widespread adoption of the technology until there are clear apps for it.

Strangely enough, I think the thing that brought this most home to me was when I registered and installed N2MP3 on my iMac DV Special Edition, which is connected to my DSL modem through a D-Link DI-701 Residential Gateway. Once the gateway was configured properly, all I had to do was have my iMac use DHCP to get on the Internet, and it all connects and disconnects transparently—no more screwing around with the MacPoET or Sympatico PPPoE software, worrying about whether my favorite game is going to automagically quit MacPoET and disconnect me, etc. etc. etc. That's great. But the first time I slid one of my audio CDs into my drive, and a couple of seconds later its title on the desktop changed from "Audio CD 1" to "Crash," and I double-clicked it and each track had the right title, and when I dragged either the disk or a track to my hard disk it all got encoded as MP3s... that's when I finally got it.

An always-on reasonable-bandwidth connection means that developers can take advantage of the huge wealth of information that's on the Internet in ways that are effectively transparent and unobtrusive to the user. The thing to look for isn't better search engines, it's no search engines. It has more to do with silently, quickly making and recognizing correlations among the information that's local (a CD has a unique identifier) and the information that's not (the CD's title is "Crash," it's by the Dave Matthews Band, and its tracks are as follows...). Then there's a human interface challenge in supporting humans in making use of these correlations (N2MP3 is great because it acts as a Finder extension, leveraging the Finder's treatment of audio CDs as a type of file system).

Imagine how different the experience would be if, when I slid an audio CD into my iMac, up popped a PPP dialer, which then took 15-20 seconds to make a 56K connection whose effective throughput is actually about 28kpbs. Only then would we get to the unavoidable bits of resolving the cddb.com domain, sending the request for info, and receiving the result, and all those network round trips would take longer. Chances are I'd be turning off N2MP3 in a hurry, or manually building a local CDDB cache using Audion in my copious spare time. And that would only be possible because I'm a geek who knows what CDDB is, a "cache" is, and that I can use Audion to build a local CDDB cache. The average user who didn't know all of this would be stuck.

This is admittedly a trivial example, but part of my point is that the potential non-trivial examples should seem this trivial, at least in the sense that they "just work" like this. So what are the general elements of this story?

  1. DSL/cable. Accept nothing less. Speed is the ultimate enabling technology.
  2. The gateway. This makes using a PPPoE-based DSL/Cable ISP as painless as being on a LAN. No dial-up dialogs or PPPoE client software on your machine. Since it also acts as a firewall, it makes you more secure, too.
  3. Data correlation. Some of the data is local; some of it is on the Internet. With speedy transparent Internet access, the difference is extremely hard to notice.
  4. Integration. The data that's coming in from the Internet needs to be melded seamlessly into whatever process I'm undertaking as a user. Again, N2MP3 is an excellent example because the Mac already treats an audio CD as a file system; N2MP3 just hijacks the naming and copying processes for that file system.

I wonder what else we can integrate in a similar fashion?

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