Disruptive Telephony

On the eve of Facebook's major "F8 Developer Conference" happening April 12-13, the company has launched a clear attack on Snapchat's "Snapcode" method of connecting users with their new "Messenger Codes". If you go into the newest version of Facebook Messenger on iOS (which is the only platform I have to test right at this moment) and click on the gear icon in the lower right labeled "Settings", you now see a brand new profile screen:

There are two things to note here:

1. The circular shaped code around my profile image; and
2. The new short URL of m.me/dyork which brings me to a web version of Facebook Messenger. (More on that in a different post.)

The circular code clearly reminded me of Snapchat's "Snapcode", where mine is:

And sure enough, when I clicked on the "People" icon at the bottom of the Messenger app, the first option on the top is "Scan Code":

Since I had learned about these codes via a tweet from Chris Messina, I pointed my phone at my laptop screen where his Messenger Code was visible:

As I got closer to the code, the Messenger app automagically recognized the code and put me into a message window with Chris:

I didn't chat with him as I didn't have a reason to do so and I don't recall us actually meeting. But I could ... it was this easy to get connected.

In a similar way to Snapchat, from the "Scan Code" window there is a symbol in the lower left corner that lets you access your phone's photos. So if you receive a Messenger Code via some other method (such as Twitter where people are already posting their codes using the #F8 hashtag) and save that image to your photos, you can access it from the "Scan Code" page and connect with the person.

From that same "Scan Code" page you can also tap "My Code" to see your code. Here's mine:

I can now share that Messenger Code out through the icon in the upper right and get it out into other social services (as I did on Twitter), or via text message, email, DropBox or anything else.

(Amusingly, while I could share the image out to Snapchat, the image is shared as square and since Snapchat uses full vertical images it cropped the image... meaning that the full Messenger Code would not be displayed and presumably would not work.)

So What?

At this point you may be saying "so what?" and wondering what value this really brings.

As I wrote about last year, messaging is all about "the directory dilemma", i.e.

People will only USE a communication application if the people they want to talk to are using the application.

It's all about having the most massive directory of users and growing that directory.

As Snapchat has demonstrated, the use of these "user codes" takes away the friction of figuring out how to connect with someone.

Over the past months a number of people I know have changed their Twitter and Facebook profile images to be their Snapcode. All I need to do, then, is point Snapchat on my phone toward their image and... ta da.. I can send them a connection request. No worry trying to look up their name... or figure out which of the many "Dan Yorks" I am if they are trying to connect to me.

Simple. Easy.

In many ways it's the proprietary version of QR codes... although focused on connecting two users rather than (as is often the case with a QR code) sending you to a web page or other site.

I expect we'll start seeing people change their Twitter profile photos to include their Facebook Messenger Code.

If people do, Facebook can steal the messaging from that rival platform. If you advertise your Messenger Code as the profile on another service, you are effectively saying "I prefer to get Facebook Messenger messages".

Take away the friction of connecting and let users advertise how to connect on your messaging platform.

If I were the organizer of an event, and I wanted to use FB Messenger as my primary messaging app, I could very easily see adding my Messenger Code to the event website, or even to printed flyers that might hang in a local coffee shop, library, gym, school or wherever...

Simple. Easy.

What About Brands? Facebook Pages?

I could see a huge benefit to brands to be able to publish these Messenger Codes, particularly with the expectation of "chat bots" being unveiled at F8 this week.

Again, from Facebook's point of view, this would keep the messaging within Facebook's walled garden, and continue to keep Facebook having the biggest directory of active users.

Tonight I couldn't discover anything similar in the Pages app or any other place. But you would think it would be coming... we'll have to stay tuned to F8 coverage this week to find out more.

What About Messaging Spam?

But if you publish your Messenger Code everywhere, what about spam?

Another good question... and since I published my Messenger Code on Twitter, perhaps I'll find out the answer over the next day or so! :-)

Perhaps Facebook will filter them all into the "Message Requests" that was very hard to find. I don't know! I have to think they will do something to ensure Messenger doesn't descend into the spam pit as email has.

How Else Can Messenger Codes Be Used?

We'll have to see what they tell us at the "F8 Developer Conference" this week... stay tuned!

What do you think about these Messenger Codes? Do you think it will help in connecting you with people? Will your promote your code? Or do you think it is all a waste of time? Let me know in the comments or on social media...

Is it time to use Transport Layer Security (TLS... essentially what we used to call "SSL") to add a layer of trust and security to Voice-over-IP (VoIP) that uses the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP)?

Way back in June 2014, I gave a talk on this topic at the SIP Network Operators Conference (SIPNOC) in Herndon, Virginia. I recorded the audio of the session... but then lost track of the recording. I recently found it and, since much of it is (sadly) still relevant, I decided to release the recording as one of my The Dan York Report audio podcast episodes:

The slides that go with the presentation are available on SlideShare:

You'll see in the slide deck that I also provide some tutorials around DANE and DNSSEC along the way.

Coincidentally, I learned on Facebook over the weekend that my friend Olle Johansson was speaking on this exact topic at the FOSDEM 2016 conference in Brussels this weekend. His slides about SIP & TLS are also available on SlideShare, and he has more recent information - and also the conclusion that we need to use "SIP Outbound" for any of this to work:

Olle's last slide about what we need to do hits on the key points - and I agree with his conclusions.

Let's look at how we can get more TLS used within SIP to bring about a more secure and trusted VoIP infrastructure!

Today Microsoft announced that they acquired the technology of Talko, a communication app created by Ray Ozzie and launched back in September 2014. Fortune has an article on the acquistion, as do a good number of other media sites.

After Talko first launched, I wrote about my initial experience - and the problem I had of Talko working through my home firewall. But I was intrigued by the possibilities laid out in a Medium article about how Talko could change communication and integrate voice, chat and messaging in interesting ways.

The reality, though, was that Talko was a classic case of suffering from the Directory Dilemma - as I said in that article:

People will only USE a communication application if the people they want to talk to are using the application.

And that was true for me... I tried out Talko, as I try out many apps. I used it for a while. And then... I stopped.

The people with whom I communicate were not regularly using Talko.

You can see the recognition of this dilemma in today's front page of Talko's web site:

However, as engaged as many of you have been, the reality is that the broad-based success of communications apps tends to be binary: A small number of apps earn and achieve great viral growth, while most fall into some stable niche.

For all the value and enjoyment it's delivered, and for all the team's listening and perseverance, Talko was largely on the path to filling a (passionate) niche. We're in this to have great impact, so it's time for a change.

and:

We deeply appreciate the commitment that so many of you made in betting on Talko. You invested your time and your reputation to convince your friends and co-workers to use the product with you.

This is the reality that messaging / communication apps have to face today. Either somehow build that massive directory - or be happy (and financially stable) within the certain niches and communities in which your product can thrive.

What's next for the Talko team (minus Ray Ozzie, who has said he will not be re-joining Microsoft) isn't 100% clear. Both the Microsoft and Talko posts today are vague, with the latter saying:

As part of the Skype team, we'll leverage Talko’s technology and the many things we’ve learned during its design and development. We'll strive to deliver the best of our product’s innovations far more broadly than on our current path.

and:

Looking forward, we hope to hear from you again as we find ways to deliver the best of Talko in Skype.

We'll have to see what pieces of Talko they bring into Skype.

Congrats to Ray Ozzie and the Talko team - and to Microsoft - on this acquisition. I hope it does work well for all involved.

Meanwhile, we can look and wonder which of the zillion new messaging apps out there will be the next to fold into a larger player...

P.S. There's a thread on Hacker News about today's announcement and there was a really long thread on HN back in 2014 when Talko was announced that may still be of interest.

I finally gave up. After months of trying to continue to use my older iPad 2 with first iOS 8 and then iOS 9, as chronicled in several blog posts, I finally gave in and bought a new iPad Air 2. These two blog posts, and the many comments left both on the posts and on social media, show I am clearly NOT alone in wanting to continue using my iPad 2:

• Will iOS 9 Make My iPad2 Usable Again? (June 2015)
• UPDATE: Will iOS 9 Make My iPad2 Usable Again? (Reports after the upgrade.) (September 2015)

What finally did it for me is that after the iOS 9 upgrade, I was no longer able to use a specific application that I use all the time.

To explain a bit more, I coach a competitive girls Junior Curling team that my daughter is a member of. As part of that, I've been using an app call "iCurlStats" to track the actions and statistics in curling games so that we can be able to go back over them afterward. When I tried to use it in a recent curling tournament (a "bonspiel") it kept crashing all the time... and at terrible moments when I'd entered half of an "end" of a curling game.

It was so frustrating.

And unfortunately I discovered that the makers of that "iCurlStats" app seem to have gone out of business. The app is gone from the AppStore and the developer's website is completely gone. (In the little bit of digging it looks like the company may have been acquired by another company who then shut down different parts of the acquired company.)

So the chances of me getting an updated version of the app from the developer that would still work with an iPad 2 running iOS 9 were basically non-existent.

So I gave up. I gave in to the "planned obsolesence" and forked over more money to Apple for a iPad Air 2. This is the latest iPad in this size and so one would hope that Apple will keep it around for a while. Because I have come to heavily use a number of apps that are only on iOS, I'm right now locked into Apple's shiny, pretty walled garden. And I'm reluctantly okay with that because the apps are useful and help me get things done.

But I will also now be VERY CAUTIOUS applying future iOS updates to this iPad.

Had I not "updated" the iPad 2 to iOS 8 and left it running iOS 7 it probably would still be quite workable. (At least until I was forced to upgrade to newer apps that only ran on iOS 9 or later.) Now the iPad 2 will become something I use for an extra web browser screen or for some of the music apps... at least while all of those continue to work.

So that's the end of the saga.

No more glacial slowness for me - the iPad Air 2 is a remarkable and fast tablet. I can chart my curling games extremely easily and it works great for all the other apps I use, too.

Hopefully I can get a good run of years out of this one.

---

An audio commentary on this topic is also available:

---

P.S. There's another part to the story, too. After getting all set up on the iPad Air 2 and having iCurlStats work great - and getting all set up for the curling bonspiel all this past weekend... I decided that I wasn't comfortable with using an app that was no longer supported at all. In my research I had stumbled upon Curl Coach, a newer iPad app for curling coaches, and wound up using it for this past weekend's bonspiel. It is an amazing application! It's not cheap ($40 USD), but it's well worth it for how well it helped me work with our team! I don't know if this would have run on the iPad 2 (removing the need to buy the iPad Air 2), but I'm sure it wouldn't have run as fast as it did... and that is key when you're in the midst of recording a game.

---

If you're interested in what I said last month at AstriCon 2015 in my keynote on "Open Source And The Global Disruption of Telecom: What Choices Will We Make?", the video and slides are both available.

As I wrote about previously, the context for this discussion was to talk about the changes that are happening all around us in terms of the ways in which we communicate. Here was the abstract:

There is a battle raging for the global future of telecommunications and the Internet. Taking place in networks, board rooms and legislatures, the battle will determine how we all communicate and what opportunities will exist. Will telecom support innovation? Will it be accessible to all? Will it give us the level of security and privacy we need to have the open, trusted Internet? Or will it be restricted and limited by corporate or government gatekeepers?

The rise of voice-over-IP has fundamentally disrupted the massive global telecommunications industry, infrastructure and policies. Open source software such as Asterisk has been a huge driver of that disruption and innovation.. but now what? What role do platforms such as Asterisk play in this space? And what can be their role in a telecom infrastructure that is now mobile, increasingly embedded (Internet of Things) and more and more using proprietary walled gardens of communication?

How well I delivered on that will be up to you to decide... but I felt good about how it all came out and received many great comments and feedback throughout the rest of the event and afterwards. And, as a speaker I could see from the crowd (about 500-ish people) that they were NOT looking down into their smartphones or laptops... which is always a good sign! ;-)

A key point of what I aimed to do was to bring people up to a higher level to think about how their own actions fit into the broader context of what is happening in the world today.

It was fun to do! And I loved all the questions I was getting after that. My goal was to make people think... and it seemed that at least for some I did.

My part of the video starts after 15 minutes of introductory items (this was the opening of the event), so if you watch in the embedded video below you'll need to move forward to the 15:00 mark. You can also follow this direct link to the start of my segment with an introduction to me from Mark Spencer, the creator of Asterisk.

(And yes, this was the first time I had ever given a presentation wearing a ponytail in the long hair experiment I've been trying this year... I'm still not 100% sure I'm going to keep this style. This may be the first and only presentation you see with me like this.)

Unfortunately, the video only shows me talking on stage and doesn't show the slides I was using... so you don't understand what I'm talking about when I reference the slides.

I've posted the slides to my SlideShare account but as you'll see without the video or audio they aren't of much value. This was a wonderful opportunity for me to present in the very minimalist style I prefer where I only use images or a few words - and I thoroughly enjoyed doing so.

However, syncing the slides to the video is not something you'll probably find easy. At some point perhaps I'll create another video showing both my speaking and the slides... but I don't know that it will happen anytime soon.

Meanwhile, here they are...

Some of the links I reference in the presentation include (in the order of their appearance):

• Open Stand - the modern paradigm for standards
• Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)
• I didn't mention this actual link, but a good document about "permissionless innovation" is: Permissionless Innovation, Cornerstone of a Successfull Internet
• ITU State of Broadband 2015
• UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) mention Internet access
• Internet Society Global Internet Report 2015 on mobile evolution
• KPCB Internet Trends 2015 report (from Mary Meeker and team)
• World IPv6 Launch measurements
• Google's IPv6 statistics
• Internet Society Internet of Things (IoT) report
• RFC 7258 - Pervasive Monitoring Is An Attack
• Internet Invariants: What Really Matters
• The Cluetrain "New Clues" as a listicle
• Collaborative Security
• Internet Society page about the WSIS+10 Review in December 2015
• Page about getting involved with the Internet Society

If you enjoyed this presentation and would like to have me potentially speak at your event, please do contact me. I've been speaking for many years and very much enjoy giving these kind of presentations at all types of events.

Last month the first Request For Comments (RFC) was published where I was one of the co-authors. Ironically, this RFC 7649 had nothing to do with SIP, VoIP, telecom, IPv6, DNSSEC, security... or any of the other open Internet standards I've been working on in recent years!

In fact, it's not a "standard" at all but rather an "informational" document.

This document collects together a series of best practices for how someone can fill the role of the "jabber scribe" at IETF meetings, such as the IETF 94 meeting about to happen in Yokohama, Japan, starting this weekend. (Which I will not be attending due to scheduling challenges.) You can read RFC 7659 at:

http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7649

As the abstract states:

During IETF meetings, individual volunteers often help sessions run more smoothly by relaying information back and forth between the physical meeting room and an associated textual chatroom. Such volunteers are commonly called "Jabber scribes". This document summarizes experience with the Jabber scribe role and provides some suggestions for fulfilling the role at IETF meetings.

The document came about because over the years that I've been involved with the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) I've come to both value the critical role the "jabber scribe" can play - and I've also tried to do the best I can to perform that role when I'm in working group sessions at IETF meetings. I typically volunteer as a jabber scribe in any of the sessions I'm in and try to make the experience as good as possible for remote participants.

Largely my interest is because I spent many IETF meetings as a remote participant and I knew how poor that experience can be.

A few years ago after one of the IETF meetings, I made a comment to a couple of people that we ought to write down some of the suggestions and best practices so that people could easily get some ideas for how they could help out in the role. If they were new to the idea... or even if they had been around but were interested in doing the role better.

I kept track of some ideas ... and a small group of us kept occasionally bouncing ideas around... but none of us had the cycles to write the actual document.

Then last year at, I think, the Toronto IETF meeting in July, Peter St. Andre and I were talking about it again - and this time we actually got it off the ground! More precisely, Peter kicked it off and then he and I went through several rounds of revisions and comments.

Given that Peter's authored 35+ RFCs and countless Internet-Drafts (I-Ds), he knows the IETF process inside and out and so was able to guide the document through the publishing process, including having it move through the "independent submission" stream of RFC documents. I've written a number of Internet-Drafts over the years, but none have yet progressed to an RFC. I learned a great bit from Peter through the process and look forward to using that knowledge in the future.

I greatly appreciate Peter's leadership on this - and I hope that this document will be helpful to many folks out there who are helping involve more people remotely in the IETF's standards process.

Given the timezone difference with Japan, I'm not sure how many of the IETF 94 working group sessions I'll actually be able to attend remotely... but if I do, I'll be hoping that whomever is acting as the Jabber scribe will help include those of us who are remote.

Meanwhile, it is kind of fun to have my name on an RFC, even if it's an Informational one. I look forward to being able to play even more of a role in the IETF standards process in the years ahead...

Two weeks from today I'll be in Orlando giving the opening keynote address at AstriCon 2015. The abstract of the session is:

Open Source And The Global Disruption Of Telecom - What Choices Will We Make?

Wednesday, October 14th, 2015 - 9:00 am to 9:45 am - Pacifica Ballroom 7

There is a battle raging for the global future of telecommunications and the Internet. Taking place in networks, board rooms and legislatures, the battle will determine how we all communicate and what opportunities will exist. Will telecom support innovation? Will it be accessible to all? Will it give us the level of security and privacy we need to have the open, trusted Internet? Or will it be restricted and limited by corporate or government gatekeepers?

The rise of voice-over-IP has fundamentally disrupted the massive global telecommunications industry, infrastructure and policies. Open source software such as Asterisk has been a huge driver of that disruption and innovation.. but now what? What role do platforms such as Asterisk play in this space? And what can be their role in a telecom infrastructure that is now mobile, increasingly embedded (Internet of Things) and more and more using proprietary walled gardens of communication?

Join the Internet Society's Dan York in an exploration of what the future holds for telecom infrastructure and policy - and how the choices we make will determine that future.

Sounds great, eh?

Now I just have to deliver on that lofty rhetoric! :-)

Seriously, though, I'm very much looking forward to giving this presentation and I'm delighted that the folks at Digium asked me to speak. We're at a critical time in the evolution of our global communications infrastructure... with everything moving to IP and also moving to mobile, there are incredibly important choices we have to make for our future.

In the talk, I'll be speaking about the scenarios we have for what our future Internet could look like. I'll be talking about the role of open source. I'll be challenging the audience with some questions to ponder. I'll touch on some of the incredibly important - yet hard to understand - global policy issues such as the upcoming WSIS+10 Review in December - and why an open source developer should even remotely care! I'll of course hit on security issues and the rise of mobile... and more...

I'm excited!

I'm also excited to finally attend an AstriCon event. I used to write about Asterisk a good bit and for a while was running my own server in my home office for VoIP... but in all that time I never was able to work in attending an AstriCon!

If you are going to be there in Orlando, please do say hello! (There's still time to register!)

P.S. And yes, Olle Johansson, I'll be sure to work in at least one reference to IPv6! And TLS, too! Don't worry! :-)

Back in June, I published a post titled "Will iOS 9 Make My iPad2 Usable Again?" that seemed to strike a nerve with the legions of iPad2 owners out there wondering about the future of their device. There have been a good number of comments on the original post - and I've received a fair number of private email messages asking how my upgrade went. The question now being asked is:

Does iOS 9 make your iPad 2 run BETTER?

Sadly, the best answer seems to be...

maybe.

Reports have been decidedly mixed, both in the media as well as in the comments to that June blog post here. Some people reported improvements while others said it was the same (or worse).

A couple of people (one example) have reported that after upgrading to iOS 9 and then doing a factory reset the performance dramatically improved. The issue there, though, as I understand it, is that you lose all your apps, settings, etc. and would basically need to completely rebuild how you have the iPad 2 set up. However, if the alternative is not using it, I guess that's an option to consider.

ArsTechnica published an article on September 16 with the conclusion "Not worse than iOS 8, but missing many features" that noted that many of the new features in iOS 9 simply don't work on the iPad 2. They noted that the speed improvements are not significant. There's a lengthy comment thread there, too.

In my own case, I haven't really seen any dramatic benefits after the upgrade. Quite honestly I've been too insanely busy with work activities that I haven't really had the chance to give it much of a test. I do like the new keyboard layout. Some of the cosmetic changes are nice.

It's still sllllooowww to launch applications and to switch between them.

Maybe I'll try the factory reset route and rebuild the device... or just accept the slowness of it.

Given that I keep getting messages asking me my opinion, I'll summarize my view at this moment:

• If your iPad 2 already runs iOS 8, UPGRADE! Performance can't really get any worse than iOS 8, and might just get better.
• If your iPad 2 is still on iOS 7... well... think about it.

On this last point...there's a challenge here - if all you want to do is browse the web and send/receive email, you may be okay keeping your iPad running quickly on iOS 7.

BUT...

... you are increasingly going to find that apps aren't available for iOS 7. As Andrew Cunningham writes in that Ars Technica article:

not because you won't take a small performance hit but because developers will increasingly abandon that older OS version if they haven't already. Apple's iOS updates roll out quickly, but the downside of that is that there's not a ton of incentive for developers to support older releases forever and ever. It's common for developers to support the current release and the immediately previous release, but starting today that doesn't cover iOS 7 anymore.

So the choice may be between a snappy web browser tablet or a slow tablet with newer apps. Or... time to upgrade. :-)

If I get a chance to really use the iPad 2 and write more of a response, I will do so, but meanwhile I thought I'd share these initial thoughts and links.

Your comments are welcome about your own experience...

---

Photo credit: an image of a massive glacier by David Stanley on Flickr

It was four years ago today that I joined the Internet Society staff... and what an amazing four years it has been!

If I go back and read my long post here about joining ISOC in September 2011, my passion and motivation continues to be the same - if anything, that passion has only gotten stronger!

As I wrote about last year in my three-year post, the "Internet of opportunity" that we all value is under severe threat.

The big change for me this past year, was, of course, the big change of joining the Internet Society Strategic Communications team in March 2015 (you can also listen to an audio recording).

That's been a wonderful yet crazy change!

If you go back and look at what I wrote last year - or two years ago - it's all about the technology behind the Internet and how we need to improve the infrastructure to make the Internet work better, be faster and be more secure.

The change this year is that now I'm more involved in other areas of Internet Society work, particularly in the public policy space. You can see that in some of the posts I've been writing for the main ISOC blog (scroll down my bio page to see the list). I've been very involved in adding content to the public policy and Internet governance sections of the website - and I've been working on our overall content strategy for a range of different websites (whereas in the past I mostly just focused on the Deploy360 site).

I've also found myself involved in projects such as standing up a web site for our Call For an Open WSIS+10 Preparatory Process... which it was only after getting it all set up that I really sat back and realized we were coordinating a coalition of organizations that was calling on action from the President of the United Nations General Assembly! Quite a different level of advocacy than I've been involved with in the past! (And still open to sigantories, by the way...)

My new role this year has given me an amazing view about all the work the Internet Society is doing around the world... it's truly inspiring to see it all.

Perhaps most inspiring is to see that the work is ultimately about helping people have better lives. Yes, technology is definitely a large part... but the work we do is about how technology enables better communication, connection, collaboration, creativity and commerce... it's the effect on people that matters most.

The new role is crazy busy... I'm definitely NOT sitting around playing Solitaire or Tetris! :-)

But we have a great team... and we as an overall organization are working on getting more focused on what activities we can do to have the biggest impact on ensuring the "Internet of opportunity" is available for all.

I'm VERY much looking forward to what the fifth year brings!

P.S. Recently Russ White published a very nice overview of the Internet Society on the PacketPushers site - and if you're interested, becoming a member of the Internet Society is free and can connect you to others around the world who want to see an open Internet available to all!

---

An audio commentary is also available:

There was a fascinating article posted on Medium this week by the CTO of messaging app Firechat:

• How many people does it take to build a network out of phones? Fewer than you think.

In the text he outlines how they do decentralized "off-the-grid" private messaging using an ad hoc mesh network established between users of the Firechat app. It sounds like the app instances join together into some kind of peer-to-peer (P2P) network and then do normal "store-and-forward" messaging.

Of note, the apps do NOT need an Internet connection, or even a cellular network connection - instead they can use the Bluetooth and WiFi radios in the mobile phones to create a private mesh network and connect to other users of the Firechat app.

Naturally, having spent some time exploring P2P networks back when I was playing around with P2P SIP and distributed hash tables (DHTs) and other technologies, I immediately jump into the techie questions:

• How are they routing messages from one user to another?
• How is the "directory" of users in P2P mesh maintained?
• What addresses are they using for the communication? Is this still happening over IP addresses? Or are they using some other kind of addressing?
• How do users join and leave the mesh network?
• How do user get authorized to join the private mesh? (Or is it just open to all?)
• How secure is the communication between the parties?
• Is the message encrypted or private in any way? Or is it just plain text?
• How well do smartphone batteries hold up if multiple radios are being used? What is the power impact of joining into a mesh network like this?

None of that is covered in this article, of course... this piece is more about the theory of how this can work given a particular density of users. It introduces the phrase "percolation threshold" and provides some background and research into how these kind of networks can be created.

I've always been fascinated by P2P networks like this sounds to be. The beauty of the Internet... the "Internet Way", so to speak... has been to support distributed and decentralized architectures.

If you think about mail or web servers, they are (or at least were) massively distributed. Anyone could set up a mail or web server - and millions upon millions of them bloomed. While we've certainly seen a great amount of centralization due to market dominance (ex. Gmail), the architecture still is distributed / decentralized.

Except... of course, the directory is still centralized. Mail and web servers rely on the central directory of DNS to resolve domain names into IP addresses so that connections can occur. Most other applications rely on DNS for this as well.

Hence my curiousity about how Firechat is handling the directory and routing issues.

I'm also intrigued by how the article hints at integrating Internet-connected users into the P2P mesh. So you really have a hybrid network that is part P2P and part connected out to cloud-based servers.

(And all of this brings me back to those early days of Skype 8-10 years ago when so many of us were captivated by the P2P mechanisms they created... most all of which is now gone in the post-Microsoft-acquisition as Skype has moved from P2P to server/cloud-based - with one big reason being given that mobile devices apparently had speed and battery life issues participating in true P2P networks.)

A key challenge Firechat faces, of course, is the "directory dilemma" of building up the quantity of users where P2P mesh networks like this can happen. This is the same dilemma facing basically all over-the-top (OTT) messaging apps. "Percolation theory" requires a certain user density for a mesh like this to work.

That will be their struggle.

And in some urban areas I can see this working quite well. Perhaps not so much out in the woods of New Hampshire where I live!

But I wish them well with this. I love to see new explorations of potential new architectures for communication. And I can certainly see instances when ad hoc, distributed/decentralized P2P meshes like these could be quite useful.

And I'm definitely looking forward to some more technical articles that dive down into some of these questions.... I do hope they'll write more soon!

---

Photo credit: Stanislav Shalunov's article about Firechat