The difference between San Diego and Chicago, or San Diego and New York, when I compare it to running my application locally, makes me really want some kind of quantum instant communication. But since we don't have that, I really would like something like a CloudFront. Pretty much for every single application or web page that I make, I would actually like to have that.
Actually, I think it would be better if everyone and every web site had that, a way that sites could automatically be cached in servers local to everyone's city. Wouldn't that be nice?
Which reminded me of the whole concept of content-centric networking.
Here is one related project that I found: http://code.google.com/p/haggle/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content-centric_networking
The hard part about this is that to really be effective it probably means really changing the way things work. It is tough to ease into it.
This could also help with reducing the amount of data that needed to be transferred. Maybe we could figure out a way so that every website in the world would be compressed referencing a very large global dictionary that was shared on every client (or possibly partitioned for local clusters, but that is more complicated..)
Regardless of the level of compression, it would still probably be possible to distribute quite a lot of the trending web content to be cached locally. Maybe it could be a bit like a torrent client for people's desktops, or maybe web application servers could have an installed program that participates in the distribution system and also publishes to it.
Maybe it could be a browser extension or just userscript (Greasemonkey) (probably has to be an extension) that would cache and distribute web pages you view. So for example as we are clicking on Hacker News headlines we are caching those pages on our local machines. Then when another person who has the same script/extension installed clicks on that headline, it will first check his local peers, and if I am in the same city and have that file already, I can give him all of the content in a fraction of the time. If a lot of people used that extension, the web would be much faster, and it would solve a lot of problems.
I wonder if there isn't already a system like that. I mean there are probably RSS feeds that come off of Hacker News and Reddit, and a reader could actually precache all of that content. But more comprehensively, I bet there is quite a bit of content that large numbers of say programmers are constantly accessing, that could benefit from that type of system.
Can we make something like a gzip but not limited to within 32kb or anything, instead it is a giant dictionary that is a GB in size with all of the most common sequences for all of the software engineering web sites that are popular today. Then instead of sending a request to San Francisco or Chicago, I can just send a request to a guy less than a mile away who also happens to be interested in Node.js or whatever.
Maybe something like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freenet or an open source CDN.
Or something like this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osiris_(Serverless_Portal_Syste...