On the wake of Facebook's announcement that it was providing an API for third party developers to write applications that can be embedded in a Facebook page, it did not take long for some to notice that Facebook is the new AOL [1]. And, furthermore, that community applications always end up being replaced by protocols. This seems like a natural progression for certain type of systems. Let me show you what I mean with some examples.
In the beginning, there was email, and it was an application. On all mainframes email was just a program which moved text files around. As different versions of Unix appeared and people on different machines wanted to communicate with each other it became clear that what was needed was an open protocol for the exchange of email. This role was eventually filled by the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol.
Remember Compuserve [2]? It was founded in 1969 and for decades was one of the few ways, aside from Prodigy and AOL, that someone with a modem could IM, email, or find information online. These services were made obsolete not by a product, but by a protocol and a standard: HTTP and HTML.
Internet telephone and Instant Messaging are currently going thru a similar transition. Remember ICQ [3]? It used to be the dominant player, now it is one of many, soon there will only be Jabber [4]. Many big players, like Google Talk, already use jabber.
In the future, expect eBay to become a protocol. But, what do these applications have in common? you may ask. It seems to me that the important characteristics they share are:
- Increasing returns: the more people use them, the more other people want to use them.
- Person-to-person communication is a big part, in some cases all, of their attraction to users.
- They are naturally distributed applications. That is, there is no need to centralize all the data, thus they are natural multiagent systems.
There might be more but, it is time for my nap.