P2P v2.0
The internet was designed to be a peer to peer system in 1980’s. Sadly it took the form where people used their desktops as clients and connected to very privileged servers.
Today it is a mess of firewalls, NAT’s and routers and creating software for it means finding a hundred ways to deal with all that infrastructure. In 2002 we started on our effort to create communities and we weren’t taking the client/server route. Thats not what we think the future is going to be like.
There are a lot of issues with P2P systems mainly security, reliability, copyright and algorithms that scale. Things are so difficult that while hiring engineers we give them a peer to peer algorithm design problem. I don’t even want to mention the kind of answers we get. That said our Mermaid line of products is mainly composed of P2P v2.0 softwares which not only symbolize how the internet should be but also how the next generation of P2P softwares should be.
Mermaid is an attempt to assist the global citizens in shaping the next generation modern societies.