Torrent is a nice techology that enables distributed access to a file. Users share their connection and in the end the server doesn’t need to handle huge bandwidth problems and it saves costs.
While this is desired by some, there are places where this scheme needs changes. For instance, Torrent could be used to balance the bandwidth between mirrors of a site. This way instead of just picking one server (possibly) very loaded, the bandwidth could be automaticly distributed by less loaded server and possibily by phisical location too.
Another usage I see to Torrents is to web sites themselves. Presently, deploying a html using Torrent could be something unthinkable because most content is dinamic. Yet the tendency we see is to separate design from logic, like in ASP.Net. If such usage patterns envolve we can distribute the design from several locations, including users, and data itselft would be loaded from a few servers using webservices. Actually you don’t need to bother much with this, a easy way to test this would be to download a html file via torrent, and if the html file did some AJAX calls to webserver it would be a complete proof of concept.
To accouplish this and other uses, there are things Torrent need to improve and most importantly, browsers should implement something like httptorrent:// and make it work seamless and fast. This is something I would love to work out one of this days.
By the way, afaik Microsoft Vista will include a native peer-to-peer network library, maybe they are taking this step thinking about the same as me. If this would prove to be true, thats another monopolistic try of them… lets hope not, or lets hope torrent scheme gets a standard before them.
