A hybrid P2P/Infrastructure platform for personal and social Internet services

While pure Web-based services and P2P technologies are popular for personal and social networking, they both have inherent limitations. A hybrid P2P/Infrastrucutre approach could leverage strengths and address limitations of both paradigms. In this paper we propose such a platform based on MyNet, our P2P personal and social networking system. The new hybrid architecture enhances the properties of pervasive access, security and ease of use found in MyNet through the introduction of infrastructure-hosted MyNet Virtual Devices (MVD). MVDs act as userspsila personal devices, but also host MyNet-aware Internet services (MaIS), proxies for 3 rd party Internet services. A proof-of-concept prototype and user results are presented to showcase key system features.