Delay-Tolerant Social Networking
Sonja Buchegger · 2009
To address privacy concerns in current online social networks, we previously proposed to use a peer-to-peer infrastructure and encryption, thereby recreating the features of online social networks in a distributed, provider-less, community-driven, and privacy-preserving way. Once the functionality is distributed, social networks are no longer dependent on Internet connectivity for every transaction – in contrast to current web-based services. We therefore have the opportunity to take into account locality, both in terms of connectivity by direct exchange between devices, and in terms of content, such as local community interests and events. This way, social networking applications can benefit from local storage, connectivity, and delay-tolerant data transfer via social encounters.