Litter: A Lightweight Peer-to-Peer Microblogging Service

Microblogging has become an important part of the social web evolution and is being utilized in many aspects such as advertising, political campaigns, and popular uprisings. Due to its heavy centralization, many have proposed decentralized alternatives based on a variety of models. This paper suggests a fully distributed approach built on top of existing peer-to-peer technologies. We demonstrate that, by exploiting the services of current peer-to-peer middleware along with the properties of the social graph, it is possible to create a simple, yet practical microblogging service that is impervious to many of the shortcomings of their centralized counterparts. The approach has been implemented as a software prototype that is readily available for download in order to test our design in real life environments. 1