When the World Wide Web started. It used to be that I would put up a web page, you would
link to it, and I would link to yours. To get around, we would all "surf the links". The web was
a web.
But shortly after, the likes of Yahoo! and Lycos came on the scene to build search engines, or
information portals. You go to one place to find all the information. Ideally that would be
true. The problem with portals? They stuff you with ads. They are outdated. They basically
control the flow of information. (Proven in a recent IBM/Altavista study of the Internet.)
Now, however, Gnutella puts the personal interaction back into the Internet. When you run a
Gnutella software and connect to the Gnutella Network, you bring with you the information
you wanted to make public. That could be nothing, it could be one file, a directory, or your
entire hard drive (I wouldn't recommend this option).
The power behind this is amazing. That data which you have bothered to keep on your hard
disk is what you found to be valuable. So when you share it you are sharing what is most
valuable on the entire Internet.