I recently had a meeting with people who practically could not imagine a form of discovery that didn’t involve a god-like central registry. Notifications, peer to peer relationships were heretic ideas on this call. Of course registries are good. And repositories are even better. But a registry is not the only way to discover services and it shouldn’t be. The delicious irony is that the meeting used NetMeeting and that we spent the first 5 minutes of the call repeating the IP address of the person hosting the NetMeeting to every single new participant upon joining. Instead of simply using the registry that was available (NetMeeting’s directory).