Xodx - A node for the Distributed Semantic Social Network

The world wide web (WWW) is not anymore just an information retrieval system [1] but rather an interactive communication medium. Within the last decade online social networks have evolved and constantly increased in popularity. The currently most used online social network services, according to their estimated monthly active users1, are Facebook (1.27 billion, facebook.com), Google Plus (541million, plus.google.com) and Twitter (283million, twitter.com). Compared to the estimated total users of the WWW of 2.93billion, over 40% of the users of the WWW are actively using Facebook. This concentration on some single services contradicts the actual organisation of the WWW and the whole Internet as a network of decentrally organised and interconnected computer nodes. This situation bears risks regarding the privacy, data security, data ownership, reliability of the services and freedom of communication. By building up a distributed online social network with multiple interconnected services this risks can be minimised and a much more flexibly expendable network is created. We present Xodx (http://aksw.org/Projects/Xodx, includes a live demo) an implementation of a node for the Distributed Semantic Social Network (DSSN). The DSSN is a general architecture for building an online social network using Semantic Web standards and additional protocols for real-time communication. Xodx provides functionality for publishing and editing personal profiles, adding friends to the friend list, sending and receiving friendship requests, publishing posts and following other users activities across distributed nodes.