The Essence of Why We Blog

We here at ThirdPipe has been pontificating about the new ‘ThirdPipe’ that will replace the old services we all were born into. We have looked at the technologies, politics and peripheral support systems. We will continue to do so. But we are not alone in that view. Doc Searls in his latest Linux Journal posting –

The Net may have an end-to-end architecture (back in ‘03 David Weinberger and I called it a World of Ends), but the realities of provisioning and latency cause “difficulties” of the sort Steve Chen hinted about. If you work or live in places where you get upwards of 20Mb/sec of upload and/or download speeds (as I do), you can see the picture when you run speed tests at distances upward of a couple hundred miles from your location. tend to go down. There are exceptions, but on the whole bit transport is faster locally than over long distances.

This, of course, is why Akamai is in business too. They provide servers, services and various kinds of localized optimizations. The result, Akamai brags, “has transformed the chaos of the Internet into a predictable, scalable, and secure platform for business and entertainment”.

See the hole in that claim? It’s you. The individual. The guy or gal or small business or school or church with a basic Internet connection — and a growing sum of “content” that’s all yours, waiting for the Net to come through with its original promise of pure connected utility.

Getting that last mile to a broadband level [10mbps or better] to a significant portion of the population is a critical factor in reaching the true post industrial society that futurists discuss. Mr. Searles also has this observation –

…Though the biggest player at the back end these days is Amazon, with Amazon Web Services (AWS), which recently added DevPay and SimpleDB to EC2, S3 and the rest of the company’s growing portfolio of back-end services. Let’s run just those four down.

* DevPay is “a simple-to-use billing and account management service that makes it very easy for developers to get paid for applications they build on Amazon Web Services”
* SimpleDB runs structured queries on simple data in real time.
* EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) runs resizable compute capacity
* S3 (Simple Storage Service) provides cheap and easy storage of any size

What you’re seeing here, at least partially (and ever more completely), is the new phone company business being re-invented from the back end forward. What makes AWS a phone company business is DevPay. Billing. Phone companies are basically billing engines. The difference is that phone companies have long been in the business of billing in monopoly conditions, often for scarcities that are essentially artificial. That is, created for the simple need to have something to bill.

Amazon by providing cloud service and a portal from the virtual economy to the physical economy may stand as one of the three legs of the new information economy. The other two being Google and the Duopoly carriers. Over time anyone running a online business will most likely being dealing with all three entities.

Our goal is to keep you posted on these changes as they occur.

Doc Searles article.