Flutterby™! :

I'm linking to this only because it seems that those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it: Dave Winer tries to explain his vision of peer-to-peer (with the annoyingly snarky "P2P" abbreviation), and comes up with something remarkably similar to the past 25 years of Un*x and TCP/IP. Now he's pushing his protocol framework or something similar over HTTP, but back when I was a wee lad people were scripting FTP clients and writing more specialized apps to talk to MUDs and Archie and similar, and I got into the whole real-time network thing way late. And of course Tim Berners-Lee started developing HTML and HTTP he assumed that people would have the appropriate servers running on their machines. The best steps we can take toward Dave's vision is having world settle on a GUI framework like Gtk or Tcl/Tk which has bindings from most of the major languages so that cross-platform application usability (beyond cross-platform development and portability) becomes a reality. It often seems that we don't really make any progress, we just put more layers of technical complexity in between the people trying to communicate with each other.