For months now I’ve been dreaming of a communications protocol that would let me access the data I want, when I want, and from the software of my choosing. I’m tired of switching e-mail clients and losing my address book, or switching graphics applications and not having access to my favorite filter.

In fact, I’ve been jotting down a list of the stuff I’d like to be able to do: http://spook.myserver.org/text/jay_mcgavren/software_tasks.txt

Well, the good folks at Palo Alto Research Center seem to be on to something that will let me (let everyone) do all that. Their proof of concept software is called SpeakEasy, and this whitepaper discusses it: http://www2.parc.com/csl/projects/speakeasy/papers/dis02.pdf

To give you an example of its power: SpeakEasy was never designed to handle videoconferencing. But the minute its users shared their cameras and microphones over the network - voila - they were able to videoconference with each other.

SpeakEasy is more hardware-oriented, but I think I’ll be able to apply at least some of its concepts to software and media as well (if PARC doesn’t just do it for me). This is potentially a very big deal.