Constellation: Programming decentralised social networks

3 pages, presented at the 1st International Workshop for Languages for Distributed Algorithms (LADA-2012), Philadelphia, USA, 23-24 January 2012, co-located with POPL 2012: 39th ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT Symp. on Principles of Programming LanguagesThe growing limitations of traditional social networks have prompted work on novel and fully decentralised alternatives to implement on-line social applications. To realise these decentralised social networks, gossip protocols appear as a natural solution, as they intrinsically tend to be highly resilient, efficient, and scalable. Existing gossip-based social networks have however so far been limited to simple use-cases, that typically take a uniform view of users, peers, and the data they hold. To progress to full-fledged decentralised social networks, we posit in this paper that we now need to move to gossip-based social applications that can simultaneously cater for different types of data and services. To help in this task, this paper sketches the main ingredients of a new programming language, Constellation, that seeks to simplify the realisation and experimentation with modular social gossip-based applications