Assortative mating:

Preference for mating between similar individuals.

WASTE competes with AIM, not Kazaa The early reaction to WASTE is that it's yet another filesharing tool, and that's simply wrong. The reason WASTE is not a filesharing tool is that it doesn't support searching. Under the hood, Kazaa et al are nothing but search engines for wide area networks, while WASTE clusters are orders of magnitude too small to make a search engine worthwhile. Searching is not relevant because there just isn't enough stuff available within your cluster. WASTE is a tool for chat and IRC, with no more or less suport for filesharing than AIM. Indeed, this is the most likely reason for AOL to come down hard on the project. AOL's strategic leverage is that it has the largest base of instant messaging users, and hence is the easiest way to reach somebody over instant messaging. WASTE not only ignores the AOL Instant Messenger namespace, it sets up a new namespace, and the decentralized nature of that namespace means that no provider -- not Jabber, not MSN/Passport, not even AOL/Nullsoft -- will have a strategic edge. Because of this, it probably violates any contractual AOL guarantee to give MSN access to the AIM namespace. ........................................ Loose notes and observations: * Always-on out of necessity and practicality. Low resource usage. * Connections are established out of band, in email, external IM or IRC. * A connection is a high level of trust. * Feels like a friendnet, and in fact I've been using it as an extension of my existing friendnet. Clusters form slowly and last for a long time. * There's no need to have your connectivity vetted by jerks at AIM or elsewhere. Per Machiavelli and Stallman, once you taste freedom you can never go back. * Lurking doesn't make sense. Lurkers are the same phenomenon as having one guy in a conversation who never says anything. * This is not primarily a tool for filesharing, as Jim Hu's story on news.com suggests: The features of Waste are similar to those of file-swapping services such as Kazaa and the defunct Napster, but the difference is that only small networks of people (up to 50, according to the Web site) can use it. It is primarily a tool for chat and IRC, with filesharing as an afterthought. For example, there's no search tool. Wishlist -- * A majordomo kind of interface for ad-hoc email lists. * Better support for transitive relationships. The way it works right now is that a connection gets brokered by a friend, then is managed one to one. There needs to be transitive naming, byte passing, file sharing, etc. Links and mirrors -- * Shawn Yeager has a complete mirror of the original Nullsoft WASTE site here. (Swift move, Shawn!) * I have made a mirror of Shawn's mirror here, and created a downloadable archive of the whole thing here for anybody else who wants to run a mirror. For those who just want to read the source, I have unzipped a copy to here. The most interesting part is the design document here, which gives more details than the documentation made available on the Nullsoft site. * Wes Felter/Hack The Planet: The protocol is a piece of junk. He's right about this, but wrong that it matters. Traffic is completely reasonable within the small groups that WASTE was designed for. WASTE is a clone of Microsoft's threedegrees. Note that Microsoft is also a major investor in Groove, which is the major point of reference for WASTE, so WASTE is teasing the bull. * Short essay on this (by me) at openp2p.com. * News.com: AOL pulls Nullsoft file-sharing software Notes to people needing a connection -- * To anybody trying to establish a connection to me: 1) Send email to request my public key and IP. 2) Import them. 3) Send me your public key so that I can import it. 4) Welcome to Zion. * If I don't know you, I won't do it. Sorry.