J. Chris Anderson is chief architect of mobile technology at Couchbase, a company dedicated to developing and commercializing the open source projects Apache CouchDB and Membase. I interviewed Anderson at Contact, an unconference dedicated to the peer-to-peer culture, decentralizing the Web, routing around Internet censorship, building new digital currencies and more. We talked about how CouchDB and Couchbase fit into this agenda and how the peer-to-peer Web changes business as usual.

Services Angle

CouchDB is a particularly interesting NoSQL project because it’s not just about handling big data (though it does that too). CouchDB’s two-way replication enables some unique uses, from ad-hoc mobile social networks to massive data clusters.

One thing Anderson said to me of camera that has stuck with me is “anything with a URL is too centralized.” CouchDB makes you think about how just how distributed a database can get, and what sort of cloud services you could build with a true peer-to-peer database. Keep an eye on this project, it’s been around for years but is just getting started.