Paul Ford wrote a compelling vision two years ago:
The Marketplace Manager, or MM, looked like a regular spreadsheet and allowed you to list information about yourself, what you wanted to sell, what you wanted to buy, and so forth. MM was essentially an “logical statement editor,” disguised as a spreadsheet. People entered their names, addresses, and other relevant information about themselves, then they entered what they were selling, and MM saved RDF-formatted files to the server of their choice – and sent a “ping” to Google which told the search engine to update their index.
When it came out, the MM was a little bit magical. Let’s say you wanted to sell a book. You entered “Book” in the category and MM queried the Open Product Taxonomy, then came back and asked you to identify whether it was a hardcover book, softcover, used, new, collectible, and so forth. The Open Product Taxonomy is a structured thesaurus, essentially, of product types, and it’s quickly becoming the absolute standard for representing products for sale.
Then you enter an ISBN number from the back of the book, hit return, and the MM automatically fills in the author, copyright, number of pages, and a field for notes – it just queries a server for the RDF, gets it, chews it up, and gives it to you. If you were a small publishing house, you could list your catalog. If you had a first edition Grapes of Wrath you could describe it and give it a lowest acceptable price, and it’d appear in Google Auctions. Most of the smarts in the MM were actually on the server, as Google interpreted what was entered and adapted the spreadsheet around it. If you entered car, it asked for color. If you entered wine, it asked for vintage, vineyard, number of bottles. Then, when someone searched for 1998 Merlot, your bottle was high on the list.
Now imagine taking that vision — and decentralizing it… that would assuage some of Paul Ford’s fears:
See, I get worried about Google. They’re beginning to control a space that is essential for open dissemination of information. So far they have only demonstrated excellent intentions, but the invisible hand of the market is quite a thing, and you often find it stuck right up your ass, or in your pocket looking for your wallet. Google is there to make money. There is nothing evil about that, but corporate money making is not necessarily in the people’s interests, and even companies that appear to have great intentions are forced to make difficult decisions that ultimately screw the consumer. When companies have power – and Google is getting real power over the way that information is disseminated – they need to be watched carefully.
Not that Google isn’t sweet.
In some ways I wish there was an effort to create a P2P hugely-scaleable redundant spidering tool – exactly what Google has, but with a few million nodes on shared computers. Even better, if I could run an indexing algorithm against my own site, store the data locally, and report an overview (word list) via metadata – well, that would be snazzy, if a bit difficult to implement. Then, every relevant query via the P2P-based search mechanism could query my local server for full results…
I’m telling you, if you’d only listen, that spreadsheets are important to the future of the Internet. Not the gunky ones we have now, but super-futuristic ultra-spreadsheets. Say I wanted to sell my books, and put an ISBN number into a spreadsheet, and then applied a Semantic Web-based function. So I have ISBN 2884838483, and I enter item.book.isbn(2884838483) as the function. This goes out talks to the Library of Congress, which spits back a nice MARC record, and an XSLT script converts that an RDF descriptions according to the Open Products Hierarchy, and fills in title, author, publisher, number of pages, just like that in the spreadsheet. And each of those items can be related to other information, because there’s a standard way to define data interchange (XML) and the actual structure of the data (RDF). Web-as-spreadsheet is fun to think about, I swear.
Like all systems involving goals, resources, and actions, computation can be viewed in economic terms. Computer science has moved from centralized toward increasingly decentralized models of control and action; use of market mechanisms would be a natural extension of this development. The ability of trade and price mechanisms to combine local decisions by diverse parties into globally effective behavior suggests their value for organizing computation in large systems.
This paper examines markets as a model for computation and proposes a framework-agoric systems-for applying the power of market mechanisms to the software domain. It then explores the consequences of this model at a variety of levels. Initial market strategies are outlined which, if used by objects locally, lead to distributed resource allocation algorithms that encourage adaptive modification based on local knowledge. If used as the basis for large, distributed systems, open to the human market, agoric systems can serve as a software publishing and distribution marketplace providing strong incentives for the development of reusable software components. It is argued that such a system should give rise to increasingly intelligent behavior as an emergent property of interactions among software entities and people.
https://commerce.net/mindystaging/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/commercenet-logo-1.png00amshttps://commerce.net/mindystaging/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/commercenet-logo-1.pngams2004-08-17 10:03:472004-08-17 10:03:47Agoric Systems Reading
In the end, scalability isn’t an inherent property of programming languages, application servers, or even databases. It arises from the artful combination of ingredients into an effective solution. There’s no single recipe. No matter how mighty your database, for example, it can become a bottleneck when used inappropriately.
It’s tempting to conclude that the decentralized, loosely coupled Web architecture is intrinsically scalable.
Not so. We’ve simply learned — and are still learning — how to mix those ingredients properly. Formats and protocols that people can read and write enhance scalability along the human axis. Caching and load-balancing techniques help us with bandwidth and availability.
But some kinds of problems will always require a different mix of ingredients. Microsoft has consolidated its internal business applications, for example, onto a single instance of SAP. In this case, the successful architecture is centralized and tightly coupled.
For any technology, the statement “X doesn’t scale” is a myth. The reality is that there are ways X can be made to scale and ways to screw up trying. Understanding the possibilities and avoiding the pitfalls requires experience that doesn’t (yet) come in a box.
Decentralization is not a hammer that can hit every nail. Experience is still the mother of good judgment.
Sometime in the next few weeks, Amazon.com is scheduled to release Amazon Web Services 4.0, the next version of the electronic retailer’s toolset for developing applications that tie into its Web site. It’s the next step in Amazon’s strategy is to create a “programmable” Web site. Over the past two years, 50,000 developers have downloaded earlier versions of Amazon Web Services. InformationWeek senior editor-at-large John Foley asked Al Vermeulen (pictured right), Amazon’s chief technology officer, about how the model works.
There’s a host of [services], probably 15 or 20, maybe more, and they range from components like personalization and search applications, to fulfillment applications, supply-chain services, and on and on. The basis is, let’s think about everything we do at Amazon.com and about how we break it up into individual pieces, smaller pieces. What we try to do is break apart a piece of the business. From a technology point of view, that becomes a service. From an organizational point of view, it becomes an autonomous team with their own mission, and then we work on defining the interface to get to that service. We try to solidify that interface and make it permanent and robust. It’s kind of a bottom-up, decentralized way of building your technology, as opposed to a top-down way where you try to make all the technology look like one piece.
It’s very exciting to see where Amazon is going with this…
https://commerce.net/mindystaging/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/commercenet-logo-1.png00amshttps://commerce.net/mindystaging/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/commercenet-logo-1.pngams2004-08-13 15:06:322004-08-13 15:06:32Amazon CTO: “We’ve Just Scratched The Surface”
in August 1994, online retailing was on the cusp of a breakthrough. Advances in Web security that year started the trickle that has become a significant chunk of the economy. But that didn’t “solve” the problem of transaction security. Many data security battles are still being fought, against such foes as “phishing” and Trojan horse viruses.
Despite these dangers, U.S. shoppers will spend $144 billion online this year, according to Forrester Research and Shop.org, a division of the National Retail Association for online merchants. That’s 27 percent more than they spent online last year and 6.6 percent of total retail sales across the country, according to their joint study, released in May.
Though CommerceNet is not mentioned directly in the article, we are proud of the fact that we had a hand in 1994 in enabling early e-commerce efforts by bringing together the pioneers to create safe methods for collecting payments online. CommerceNet also celebrates our 10th anniversary this year.
The Marketplace Manager
CommercePaul Ford wrote a compelling vision two years ago:
Now imagine taking that vision — and decentralizing it… that would assuage some of Paul Ford’s fears:
Agoric Systems Reading
DecentralizationThis is all very old school – 1988! – but it’s always refresing to take another look at the basics. While a survey paper from U. Florida says that the concept can be traced to Ivan Sutherland auctioning timesharing slots in 1968, the likely origin of the term “agoric systems” (from the greek agora, or market) is Mark S. Miller and K. Eric Drexler’s chapter in The Ecology of Computation.
Best Practices Trump Decentralization
DecentralizationJon Udell wrote in Infoworld this week:
Decentralization is not a hammer that can hit every nail. Experience is still the mother of good judgment.
Amazon CTO: “We’ve Just Scratched The Surface”
Commerce, DecentralizationInformation Week:
The whole interview is great. I love this quote from Al Vermeulen:
It’s very exciting to see where Amazon is going with this…
E-commerce turns 10
CommerceAlorie Gilbert of CNET writes:
Though CommerceNet is not mentioned directly in the article, we are proud of the fact that we had a hand in 1994 in enabling early e-commerce efforts by bringing together the pioneers to create safe methods for collecting payments online. CommerceNet also celebrates our 10th anniversary this year.