Unfortunately, Johan Pouwelse, one of the Dutch researchers working on the project at the Delft University was not allowed to comment but here’s summary of the article
“Most current P2P file sharing systems treat their users as anonymous, unrelated entities, and completely disregard any social relationships between them. However, social phenomena such as friendship and the existence of communities of users with similar tastes may be well exploited in such systems, to increase their usability and performance. In this paper we present a novel socialbased P2P filesharing paradigm that exploits social phenomena by maintaining social networks and using these in content discovery, content recommendation, and downloading. Based on this paradigm’s first class concepts such as taste groups, friends, and friendsoffriends, we have designed and implemented the TRIBLER P2P filesharing system as a set of extensions to BitTorrent.”
user interface overview (click)
Taste Buddy’s
A buddy list based on your personal preferences will help you discover new content. Taste buddy’s will be determined by comparing your personal profile to that of other peers.
Cooperative downloading:
Peers from the same group can speed up the downloading by engaging in cooperative downloading. Peers can donate bandwidth to their friends and act as a collector or a helper.
“A collector is the peer that is interested in obtaining a complete copy of a particular file, and a helper is a peer that is recruited by a collector to assist in downloading that file.”
Cooperative downloading (click)
The software will be launched next month, we will keep you up-to-date.
Source:
Peer-to-Peer content sharing using social networking, content recommendation, and cooperative downloads
J.Pouwelse, P.Garbacki, J.Wang, A.Bakker, J.Yang, A.Iosup, D.Epema, M.Reinders, M. van Steen, H.Sips
