Distributed content sharing system for user communities: Master's Thesis

The social user communities like Facebook and MySpace are very popular nowadays. Most of the Internet users have visited these sites and tens of millions of users have registered and created their own profiles. The social user communities offer surveys among the registered users for finding old friends and, of course, making new ones. The communities provide an easy and simple way of keeping touch with the people that, in this current hasty world, we would not normally have time for. The users of these communities also have much content to communicate with. Services like YouTube attract tens of millions of users to share and browse the video content that other users have produced. The servers of these sites are extruded by the multimedia content. The most efficient way to share these items is not the web browser with HTTP calls but the modern P2P technology offering distributed content sharing. However, the modern P2P solutions are hard to use in this context and lack the social community. This work defines a new solution that combines the features of an online social community and a modern P2P content sharing network. The work starts with a literature review to define the key concepts and technologies of the social communities and content sharing solutions. This work also presents a few existing solutions and evaluates the scope of their functionalities. Based on this evaluation, the general requirements are gathered for sharing content in a social user community. The requirements are further refined into a design that is finally validated with a prototype implementation.