August 07, 2006, 11:43 PM — What would you say if I told you that I have never in my life sent an e-mail? What would you say if I told you that you too have never in your life sent an e-mail? You would either dismiss me as nuts or conclude that I am playing with words somehow. Indeed, I am playing with words. One word in particular. The word "send".
Imagine a Ming vase sitting next to a yellow sticky note. The note says "E.T. Phone Home". Imagine that I need to send you the Ming vase and I also need to send you the note. How can I proceed? Sending the Ming vase presents the smallest set of options. It is a physical object and therefore we have to move all of its constituent atoms from one place to another without re-arranging them. Sending the note on the other hand, presents a larger set of options. Obviously, I can put the note in an envelope and can post it or send it by courier -- the same basic methods I can use to send the Ming vase all apply. However, unless the yellow sticky note paper itself is an intrinsic part of the message, I can just send an e-mail which would be much faster and cheaper.
The important thing I want to highlight here is that the note-in-an-envelope case genuinely involves sending the message from A to B but the note-on-e-mail case does not involve "sending" at all. The electronic bits that make up the message are stored in my computer memory/disk. At the point where I "send" the message to you an exact copy is made, bit for bit. This copy is itself copied many times as the contents of the original message are replicated through many layers of protocol stack on my computer, many layers of routing out in the cloud and many layers of protocol stack again as it pops up inside your computer.
Dozens of copies are made but the message never left my computer. It was replicated, not sent. It is not just e-mail that works this way of course. The same is true of every fax you have ever "sent". Wouldn't it be great if we could send a Ming vase the same way we send e-mails or faxes? It would be considerably cheaper and we would get to keep the original! On second thoughts, scratch that idea. If we could replicate Ming vases that easily then they would have the same intrinsic value as a electronic bits - zero.
It always was and probably always will be, cheaper and faster to replicate bits rather than to send atoms. Indeed, the marginal cost of sending replicas of bit patterns is so low as to be effectively zero. For proof, you need look no further than your e-mail spam folder.
Replicas of bit patterns...Let us translate that into more physical terms. If I send you something and it does not arrive for some reason, heck, I can just send it again at effectively zero cost. It is only a copy after all....
Now let us introduce the Web into the equation. I publish a piece of information out on the cloud. You try to retrieve it and something goes wrong with your retrieval. Heck, it is only a copy operation you are performing and its marginal cost is effectively zero so just retry it!
Which bring us to the title of this article "Fast pipe. Always on. Get out of the way."[1]. We live in an age when connectivity is increasingly fast and increasingly 24x7. In such an environment, repeatedly re-trying to send/receive something until it works often makes economic sense compared to the alternative approach of guaranteed reliable message transfer.
Mashups[2] are one practical upshot of this fact. With mashups, information is generally pulled/pushed on a best-efforts basis. If something goes wrong, try again!
This is horrifying to many engineers in the same way that randomly breaking hypertext links on the Web was horrifying to a many hypertext specialists when they first encountered it. Humans are very tolerant of broken Web links. This we know. Humans are also very tolerant of Web retries in mashups. This we are learning now.
I used to think that it was only a matter of time before the web was "fixed" to provide reliable message exchange functionality without which, B2B message exchange on the Web would be impossible. I do not think that any more. I can think of numerous scenarios where the "Fast pipe. Always on. Get out of the way." approach to message exchange fits very nicely with the way we work and think in the 21^st century.
[1] http://www.isen.com/blog/2006/04/fat-pipe-bumper-sticker.html
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mashup_(web_application_hybrid)
