Weekly Review: Glimpses of a Shared Web

Last week brought several glimpses of the awesome potential that results from combining computing and telecommunications within a shared, global Web infrastructure. Several terms are being used to describe these developments.

Today's buzzwords are grid computing, Web services and P2P, whereas previously people got excited about network computing and the digital economy — but they all describe a common purpose.

Read and React

"We may not be living the dream today, but we are at last close enough to see an accurate vision what a shared Web looks like." Give us your feedback on the evolving Web in the ASPnews Discussion Forum

We're not there yet, but we've come just far enough along the way to be able to start to create practical demonstrations of what this shared Web is going to be capable of producing.

This is momentous on a historical scale; the past several centuries of economic progress were made possible primarily by improvements in the speed and ease with which individuals and communities became able to share knowledge, to collaborate and to trade with one another. Today, the shared Web allows everyone who is online to share ideas, work together and transact in real-time, either one-to-one or many-to-many, irrespective of physical location.

The Power of the Grid
One of last week's practical illustrations of the enormous capabilities of such a network came with the announcement of the McAfee.com SecurityCenter, the first phase of the desktop security provider's Grid Security Services initiative (see McAfee Taps Grid Power, Web Services To Boost Security.

Offered as a free enhancement to existing and prospective McAfee.com users — a population that already numbers around 1.5 million worldwide — each instance of the SecurityCenter is able to act as a sensor node within the McAfee security grid, reporting new threats as they are encountered on each individual machine in real time.

A nucleus of secure servers will collate and share information collected this way from across the grid, as well as help to co-ordinate the deployment of updated McAfee.com services to counter any new threats that arise. "Grid Security Services [can] learn about security threats on different parts of the grid and rapidly disseminate the appropriate protection to the rest of the grid," McAfee stated in its announcement.

McAfee is one of the few providers on the Web today with sufficient scale to put a grid like this into operation. It is a potent demonstration of what might be achieved by using distributed computing within the Web to pool knowledge and resources in real time.

Gaga Over Google
Another example came with the launch of the Google API and subsequent reactions (see Google Continues Flirt with Web Developers).

Google's indexing of Web content has already created the nucleus of a knowledge grid, in which the links published on millions of Web pages contribute to a collective rating system that helps identify the most useful sources of information for given search terms at any time.

By publishing an API (application programming interface) that gives direct, real-time access to the search engine, Google has opened people's minds to what else might be achieved by pooling real-time access both to the index and to the search engine.

A number of sites and desktops have already sprouted "Google Boxes" that show the top ten results for a given search term. Several observers suggested the API should allow Web servers to notify Google as soon as they have new content to be indexed, rather than waiting passively to be crawled, which would feed back to fresher content showing up in those Google Boxes.

All of this innovative speculation was itself happening in real time, across hundreds of weblogs — the online journals of information, comment and links that have become the newest publishing revolution sweeping the Web. Google's rating of content by both freshness and the number of referring links has been a natural fit for weblogs, making it possible for the blogging community to escalate a search result to top ranking on Google within a matter of days, by sheer weight of numbers — a further demonstration of the grid (or should that be the hive?) in action.

We've Only Just Begun
For all their potency, these isolated demonstrations barely scratch the surface of what can be achieved by linking functions together within the grid. Google's indexing of frequently updated Web sites illustrates how real-time analysis of the choices made by knowledgeable individuals can build up a composite picture of state-of-the-art thinking. McAfee's Grid Security Services shows how real-time analysis of network status can trigger the timely creation and deployment of updated services.

Now imagine for a moment that Google ranks not only content but also online Web services according to choices made by a global cross-section of trusted, knowledgeable authorities. Available on demand and in any configuration, those services include not just desktop security tools, but an entire portfolio of business functions, constantly updated based on feedback from a worldwide user base.

Put together grid computing, Web services, P2P and all the other Net-inspired buzzwords of the past 10 years and this is what you ultimately get: A shared, global Web that offers multiple aggregations of knowledge sources, collaboration centers and transaction services, categorized according to suitability and constantly kept up-to-date based on real-time user feedback. We may not be living the dream today, but we are at last close enough to glimpse what it looks like.

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