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To: Gus who wrote (8150)	5/6/1999 4:57:00 AM
From: flickerful	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 17679

Internet Multicast [ from designing calm technology...] A technology called Internet Multicast may become the next World Wide Web (WWW) phenomenon. Sometimes called the MBone (for Multicast backBONE), multicasting was invented by a then graduate student at Stanford University, Steve Deering. Whereas the World Wide Web (WWW) connects only two computers at a time, and then only for the few moments that information is being downloaded, the MBone continuously connects many computers at the same time. To use the familiar highway metaphor, for any one person the WWW only lets one car on the road at a time, and it must travel straight to its destination with no stops or side trips. By contrast, the MBone opens up streams of traffic between multiple people and so enables the flow of activities that constitute a neighborhood. Where the WWW ventures timidly to one location at a time before scurrying back home again, the MBone sustains ongoing relationships between machines, places, and people. Multicast is fundamentally about increasing peripheral reach, derived from its ability to cheaply support multiple multimedia (video, audio, etc.) connections all day long. Continuous video from another place is no longer television, and no longer video-conferencing, but more like a window of awareness. A continuous video stream brings new details into the periphery: the room is cleaned up, something important may be about to happen; everyone got in late today on the east coast, must be a big snowstorm or traffic tie-up. Multicast shares with videoconferencing and television an increased opportunity to attune to additional details. Compared to a telephone or fax, the broader channel of full multimedia better projects the person through the wire. The presence is enhanced by the responsiveness that full two-way (or multiway) interaction brings. Like the inner windows, Multicast enables control of the periphery to remain with the individual, not the environment. A properly designed real-time Multicast tool will offer, but not demand. The MBone provides the necessary partial separation for moving between center and periphery that a high bandwidth world alone does not. Less is more, when less bandwidth provides more calmness. Multicast at the moment is not an easy technology to use, and only a few applications have been developed by some very smart people. This could also be said of the digital computer in 1945, and of the Internet in 1975. Multicast in our periphery will utterly change our world in twenty years.... ubiq.com