With all of the insanity going around with P2P sites these days, I think that many of the mainstreamers need to realize something. Just because certain companies decide to build their business models around P2P piracy does not mean that P2P technology is not without its merits.

Besides the obvious candidates like Skype, there are also programs that use computers in a collective manner to help crunch such a large amount of data that it would otherwise require a supercomputer. SETI is one such example. Designed to process data collected from radio telescopes, SETI uses the idle CPU cycles from computers all over the world.

But the power of P2P apps hardly stops at trying to locate life on other worlds. No, there is actually an app that you can download that will work on a cooperative level to help process data on protein folding. Pretty wild stuff, eh?

So perhaps next time we are tempted to downplay the value of P2P technologies, we will remember that P2P can do wonders for communication and distributed computing!

Let’s get digital!