Act as distributed ... eXO, Java and Diaspora! 14 May 2011
About 3 months or so, I started to "re-explore" my old thesis project (written in Java). The idea behind it was really innovative and prophetic. It was the implementation of a decentralized social network application, emphasizing on user control of content distribution and ownership. Due to the research orientation, which me and my mentor professor (Peter Triantafillou) had followed, we didn't have the chance and time (I had started working at Bytemobile Inc.) to focus on the technical parts. So, I achieved to complete a prototype application with some social features written in Java on top of the FreePastry platform. Mostly, I used some "pseydo-functionality" to simulate the behavior of a large scale decentralized social network and provided a GUI simulator environment (Swing-powered) to test it. The result was a set of experimental evaluations denoting the viability of such an application and proving the scalability, efficiency of the system. Unfortunately or Fortunately (we don't know yet)?! Two years later, Diaspora project was born. The buzz and the popularity of the specific project proved that people all over the world are waiting impatiently such an application to handle the web social life. I am glad that people are interested in such a project and I am even more happy because the guys working on Diaspora are very passionate . I would also like to contribute or help somehow to this effort. Currently and for the next couple of months, I can't ... I have to serve my time (at the greek army :p). I am also thinking of a future collaboration of eXO and Diaspora teams. Back to ours!!! The result of our hard research work (many simulation experiments) was a project called "eXO", a scientific paper at CIDR2011 [see here], and a demo version of a web application [see here] which me and Nikos Ntarmos have accomplished in a very short period of time. The results are impressive and I wish I had the time and the resources to continue on it. We also think to open-source the project, so we will invite people to contribute and join the development team. Stay tuned! Ofcourse, we would appreciate your comments.
