A First Step Towards User Assisted Online Social Networks

Abstract

The current Online Social Networks' infrastructure is com- posed by thousands of servers distributed across data-centers spread over several geographical locations. These servers store all the users' information (profile, contacts, contents, etc). Such an infrastructure incurs high operational and maintenance costs. Furthermore, this may threaten the scal- ability, the reliability, the availability and the privacy of the offered service. On the other hand this centralized approach gives to the OSN provider full control over a huge amount of valuable information. This information constitutes the basis of the OSN provider's business. Most of the storage capacity is dedicated to store the user's content (e.g. photos, videos, etc). We believe that OSN provider does not have strong incentive to dedicate a large part of its infrastructure to store majority part of this content. In this position paper we introduce the concept of user assisted Online Social Network (uaOSN). This novel archi- tecture seeks to distribute the storage load associated to the content (e.g. photos, videos, etc) among the OSN's users. Thus the OSN provider keeps the control on the relevant in- formation while reducing the operational and maintenance costs. We discuss the benefits that this proposal may pro- duce for both, the OSN provider and the users. We also discuss the technical aspects to be considered and compare this solution to other distributed approaches.