In this paper, we present the design, implementation and our year-longmaintenance experience of SNSAPI, a Python-based middleware which unifies theinterfaces and data structures of heterogeneous Social Networking Services(SNS). Unlike most prior works, our middleware is user-oriented and requireszero infrastructure support. It enables a user to readily conduct online socialactivities in a programmable, cross-platform fashion while gradually reducingthe dependence on centralized Online Social Networks (OSN). More importantly,as the SNSAPI middleware can be used to support decentralized social networkingservices via conventional communication channels such as RSS or Email, itenables the deployment of Decentralized Social Networks (DSN) in anincremental, ad hoc manner. To demonstrate the viability of such type of DSNs,we have deployed an experimental 6000-node SNSAPI-based DSN on PlanetLab andevaluate its performance by replaying traces of online social activitiescollected from a mainstream OSN. Our results show that, with only mild resourceconsumption, the SNSAPI-based DSN can achieve acceptable forwarding latencycomparable to that of a centralized OSN. We also develop an analytical model tocharacterize the trade-offs between resource consumption and message forwardingdelay in our DSN. Via 20 parameterized experiments on PlanetLab, we have foundthat the empirical measurement results match reasonably with the performancepredicted by our analytical model.
展开▼
