abstract (1159B)
1 * Abstract 2 3 The motivation of the work presented here is the need for social interactions 4 over the internet in a scalable and privacy protecting manner. We have examined 5 existing systems from this aspect and have come to the conclusion that they do 6 not provide enough privacy or do not scale well enough for our requirements. We 7 suggest a peer-to-peer (P2P) architecture for this use and present a social 8 network based on the GNUnet P2P framework -- which provides the lower layers of 9 the network -- extended with messaging and social semantics by the PSYC 10 protocol. 11 12 Components of the system we have implemented are a service for the GNUnet 13 framework providing social semantics and messaging functionality, a client API 14 enabling application developers to write applications for the network with less 15 effort, and client applications providing messaging, contact lists and profiles. 16 17 The implementation is in a prototype stage, basic functionality, such as person 18 identities, friendship establishment and messaging in channels already work, 19 but further work is needed to enhance the functionality of the system and 20 improve the usability of the user interface.