* Abstract

The motivation of the work presented here is the need for social interactions
over the internet in a scalable and privacy protecting manner. We have examined
existing systems from this aspect and have come to the conclusion that they do
not provide enough privacy or do not scale well enough for our requirements. We
suggest a peer-to-peer (P2P) architecture for this use and present a social
network based on the GNUnet P2P framework -- which provides the lower layers of
the network -- extended with messaging and social semantics by the PSYC
protocol.

Components of the system we have implemented are a service for the GNUnet
framework providing social semantics and messaging functionality, a client API
enabling application developers to write applications for the network with less
effort, and client applications providing messaging, contact lists and profiles.

The implementation is in a prototype stage, basic functionality, such as person
identities, friendship establishment and messaging in channels already work,
but further work is needed to enhance the functionality of the system and
improve the usability of the user interface.