eXO: Decentralized Autonomous Scalable Social Networking
Andreas Loupasakis, Nikos Ntarmos, Peter Triantafillou · 2011
Social networks have been receiving increasingly greater attention. As they stand now, users are required to upload their content to make it available to others. Typically, this involves releasing ownership and control. As a result, battles have begun regarding the ownership, exploitation, and control of content between users and social network owners. Further, given the rates of growth witnessed recently, questions about the scalability of the social network services are being raised. Therefore, the following questions naturally emerge: Is it possible to architect, design, and implement decentralized social networking services that ensure scalability and efficiency, while, respecting users ’ control of their content? Can this be achieved while content can be available to others for viewing and commenting, and permit key social networking activities like tagging? This paper presents eXO, a completely decentralized, scalable system that offers fundamental social networking services. We describe the architecture of eXO and its key components which encompass (i) techniques for content indexing, (ii) novel algorithms for ranked retrieval, (iii) appropriate similarity definitions that consist of a ’content ’ and a ’social ’ part, (iv) novel algorithms for efficient distributed content retrieval, (v) novel techniques that efficiently and scalably facilitate tagging and exploit tags to enrich query results, and (vi) novel scalable methods which permit the creation of personal networks, which allow for more “intimate ” sharing and associations between users. We report on our evaluation which showcases its efficiency and scalability characteristics. eXO source code will be freely available to all, to use and test.