Distributed Social Networking Software Tools

"For many years email and usenet news constituted the majority of the
Internet's use as a tool to facilitate communication among individuals.

The last five years have given rise to a number of novel applications in this domain--which has come to be known as "social software".

Notable among these are instant messaging systems, weblogs, and services like Friendster and Tribe which exploit the concept of "six-degrees of separation".

These services generally employ centralized client-server architectures. These architectures are failing to adequately scale with the growing user-base. These services do not rely on open protocols; the user-base is fragmented among competing service providers.

Users use numerous service providers to get the features they want, but have no easy way to maintain the consistency of their information on each.

This paper summarizes the ever changing state-of-the-art in social software, and presents an alternative to this "service-centric" view of social software. The novel user-centric distributed social software model outlined in this paper overcomes many of the limitations of the current model by drawing from ideas from the Semantic Web."

A central point to this paper is that "it is clear that the centralized architecture currently associated with social software systems on the Internet can be replaced with a distributed system, without a loss of functionality."