The P in P2P is People

When Groove launched somebody asked me to explain why it was an important example of peer-to-peer technology. I said that was the wrong question. What mattered was that Groove empowered people to communicate directly and securely, form ad-hoc networks with trusted family, friends, and associates, and exchange data freely within those networks. P2P, although then much in vogue — there were P2P books, P2P conferences — wasn’t Groove’s calling card, it was a means to an end.

The same holds true for Thali. Yes it’s a P2P system. But no that isn’t the point. Thali puts you in control of communication that happens within networks of trust. That’s what matters. Peer networking is just one of several enablers.

Imagine a different kind of Facebook, one where you are a customer rather than a product. You buy social networking applications, they’re not free. But when you use those apps you are not in an adversarial relationship with a social networking service. You (along with your trusted communication partners) are the service, and the enabling software works for you.

Thali, at its core, is a database that lives on one or more of your devices and is available to one or more apps running on those devices. Because you trust yourself you’ll authorize Thali apps to mesh your devices and sync data across that mesh. The sync happens directly, without traveling through a cloud relay, and is always secured by mutual SSL authentication. You can, of course, also push to the cloud for backup.

Communicating with other people happens the same way. You exchange cryptographic keys with people you trust, you authorize them to see subsets of the data on your mesh of devices, and that data syncs to their device meshes. The default P2P mode means that you don’t depend on a cloud relay that wants access to your data in exchange for the service it provides.

For cloud services that don’t monetize your data, by the way, Thali delivers a huge benefit. Apps like Snapchat and Chess with Friends incur bandwidth costs proportional to their user populations. If users can exchange photos and gameplay directly, those costs vanish. And there’s no penalty for the user. Sending your photos and chess moves directly costs you no more than sending through the cloud.

But the key point is one that Dave Winer made back when P2P was in vogue: the P in P2P is people. With handheld computers (we call them phones) more powerful than the servers of that era we are now ready to find out what a people-to-people web can be.