A gossip-based distributed social networking system

Social networking web sites, which allow users to create identities and link them to friends who have also created identities, are highly popular. Systems such as Facebook and My Space utilize a traditional client-server approach to achieve this, which means that all identities and their social links (the entire social network) are stored and administered on central servers. Although this approach supports highly mobile user access - users can log-in from any computer - it also poses high dependence on predefined central server(s), which results in possible exploitation of private data. In this paper we present an alternative approach, based on gossip protocol, in which we use a completely decentralized peer-to-peer system to create and store the social network. Our system is self-administered and works in a highly transient environment of peer availability. We propose the design and implementation in Tribler of a distributed social networking system that is scalable and robust, allowing users to perform core social networking functions of establishing and removing social links without any requirement for centralized servers or administration.