IBM Pushes Frontiers of P2P Content Capabilities with Socializer
Imagine walking into a new office building, and having location-specific and peer-specific content appear on your PDA automatically, based on your identity and its relationship to people at that location. IBM has been imagining just such a future, and has been bringing it closer to reality with a project called Socializer, according to Instant Messaging Planet. Socializer is a prototype of an open, distributed, peer-to-peer platform with capabilities including chatting, file transfers, application sharing and broadcasting and discovery of services. By being location-centric, Socializer allows content to be contexutalized at the intersection of local and personal interests in ways that only science fiction has approached to date. While this is still blue sky stuff, these kinds of capabilities are a clear reminder of how the content industry has to focus much more aggressively on how individual content rights and use intersect with institutional capabilities and interests.