Navigating the Web 2.0 with Gossple

Abstract

Social networks and collaborative tagging systems have taken off at an unexpected scale and speed (Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Last.fm, Delicious, etc). Web content is now generated by you, me, our friends and millions of others. This represents a revolution in usage and a great opportunity to leverage collaborative knowledge to enhance the user's Internet experience. The Gossple project aims at precisely achieving this: automatically capturing affinities between users that are potentially unknown yet share similar interests, or exhibiting similar behaviors on the Web. This can fully personalizes the Web 2.0 experience process, increasing the ability of a user to find relevant content, get relevant recommandation, etc. This personalization calls for decentralization. (1) Centralized servers might dissuade users from generating new content for they expose their privacy and represent a single point of attack. (2) The amount of information to store grows exponentially with the size of the system and centralized systems cannot sustain storing a growing amount of data at a user granularity. We believe that the salvation can only come from a fully decentralized user centric approach where every participant is entrusted to harvest the Web with information relevant to her own activity. This poses a number of scientific challenges: How to discover similar users, how to build and manage a network of similar users, how to define the relevant metrics for such personalization, how to preserve privacy when needed, how to deal with free-riders and misheavior and how to manage efficiently a growing amount of data. © 2009 Springer-Verlag.