P2P architectures for distributed online social networks

Online Social Networks (OSNs) tipically exploit logically centralized infrastructure. The centralized nature of OSNs has several drawbacks including scalability, privacy, and dependence on a provider. Specifically, OSN privacy has become a major concern, particularly privacy and protection from massive data-mining and big-brotherly treatment of the users by the social networking service providers. In contrast to centralized OSNs, a distributed online social network helps to lower the cost of the provider drastically, and allows better control of user privacy. This has several consequences: in terms of privacy, no central data collection, nor any central entity that decides or changes the terms of service. In this paper we focus on the definition of P2P Distributed Online Social Network (DOSN) paradigm and propose a new approach to P2P DOSN based on Dunbar's number, which bounds the number of people one knows and keeps social contacts with.