Re: Is a Perfect Storm Forming For Distributed Social Networking?

One of the challenges for distributed social networking is dealing 
with sudden hotspots where a huge spike of interest in a single 
person causes the server that hosts that person's profile to falter 
under the load. This suggests the value for applying peer to peer 
techniques to dynamically distributing the load across many 
machines. Peer to peer techniques can also help to sustain 
performance for search by distributing the processing across many 
machines.

This of course raises lots of design challenges, e.g.

  * Retaining HTTP based identifiers for resources whilst
    using P2P protocols for dereferencing them

  * P2P search algorithms for Social Networks

  * Support for access control and audience segregation

  * Supporting a mix of social web features, including
    traditional SNS, blogs, wikis and messaging (tweets)

  * Understanding and combatting DDOS attacks on P2P networks

  * Support for anonymous identities in P2P networks when
    people would otherwise risk state persecution

There is lots of existing work that could be adapted to realize 
this, and perhaps some of it is already in progress. Is it time for 
a new open source project that pulls all of the pieces together?

  Dave Raggett <dsr@w3.org> http://www.w3.org/People/Raggett

Received on Wednesday, 12 August 2009 08:46:32 UTC