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eDonkey is closing

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Seems like RIAA is going to win another battle, closing the p2p eDonkey network. In a testimony at a U.S. Senate Judiciary Hearing on the future of P2P, MetaMachine president Sam Yagan said his company (owner of the eDonkey network) was throwing in the towel.

The battle is lost, but the war continues: eDonkey is a server based p2p network, so all you need to shut it off is going for the servers. eDonkey is the most used p2p network, as stated by Slyck, so this decision seems to be a huge drawback in the war.

But if we look at the remaining networks, like FastTrack, Gnutella or BitTorrent, they all share the "no servers, use supernodes instead" implementation, there is, the supernode functionality is built into the client; if a powerful computer with a fast network connection runs the client software, it will automatically become a supernode, effectively acting as a temporary indexing server for other, slower clients.

And since supernodes come and go, all over the IP space, like digital mushroms, they are much harder to identify and shut down. So, light infantry is down, but we still have tanks and planes for the next battle.

Mashups

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I heard this term for the first time last week in Boston. I understood "sites that use two or more external sources to provide a new service". The first reference was Mappr, which uses Google Maps and Flickr APIs to geographically organize Flickr photos. But mashups are more than this, they have a huge fun potencial, as stated by this Zdnet's post.

Update: While thinking on the subject, I decided to make my first movie mashup: five pixar movies and a soundtrack, and you have it, an all new video clip for Birds of Prey by Fat Boy Slim. While you wait for the download (6MB for a 6m49s clip) you can take a look at the Web 2.0 Mashup Matrix.

Identity 2.0

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An astonishing presentation from Sxip CEO Dick Hardt, about Identity 2.0. Very well contextualized within the Web 2.0 vision, and with great style (marketeers should also take a peek for new presentation ideas). If you have 15 minutes and 13 seconds (plus download time) watch it here.

Another step to the WebOS

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AIM, ICQ, MSN e Yahoo in a web browser near by with meebo.

Go fetch!

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Today, Google released is blog search service. It's a clean and useful service, and it was very funny for me to read other people references to my posts: i don't have trackbacks.

Meanwhile, a startup debuted in cyberspace today: truveo. They claim to have a technology which allows them to visual crawl through the Internet. Or, in more dumb words, they have crwalers able to watch movies and other visual content in the Internet, and categorized it. The few experiences I made resulted in impressive results. Try it yourself.