A Distributed Platform for Multimedia Communities

Online community platforms and multimedia content delivery are merging in recent years. Current platforms like Facebook and YouTube are client-server based which result in high administration costs for the provider. In contrast to that peer-to-peer systems offer scalability and low costs, but are limited in their functionality.In this paper we present a framework for peer-to-peer based multimedia online communities. We identified the key challenges for this new application of the peer-to-peer paradigm and built a plugin based, easily extendible and multi-functional framework. Further, we identified distributed linked lists as valuable data structure to implement the user profiles, friend lists, groups, photo albums and more. Our framework aims at providing the functionality of common online community platforms combined with the multimedia delivery capabilities of modern peer-to-peer systems, e.g. direct multimedia delivery and access to a distributed multimedia pool.