Thursday, December 18, 2008

The End of P2P

Ok, that was a little bit of an exaggeration but two years ago P2P was dominating internet traffic and now, while still dominating the upstream networks, P2P is starting to drop in relation to real-time traffic. I see the time, in the relatively near future, where P2P is a niche market in comparison to real-time traffic. This is not to say that P2P usage will drop in absolute terms, only that gaming, VoIP, online file storage, movie, real time news and sports is going to increase tremendously over the next few years.

What will this do to theNet Neutrality arguments? Real-time communications can be buffered for only so long; a web page can be delayed for 500ms without too much complaint and an email can be delayed for 1000s of milliseconds without notice.

Thursday, December 11, 2008

The Importance of Design

How important is design? My designer friends say it’s the most important thing. When I see how they translate my wireframes and HTML mock-ups and turn them into pixel-perfect design I see the difference immediately. It changes what was a good idea into something "PROFESSIONAL."

But look at some of the most important, most influential, most profitable sites and you see terrible design and an irreverent approach to pixel-perfect design: IMDB is an industry standard but it's ugly as hell. Craigslist is ugly; and how about Google, eBay and Amazon? The beauty of those sites is in their functionality.