On the feasibility of common-friend measurements for the distributed online social networks

Distributed social networks have emerged recently. Nevertheless, recommending friends in the distributed social networks has not been exploited fully. We propose FDist, a distributed common-friend estimation scheme that estimates the number of common-friends between any pair of users without disclosing the friends' information. FDist uses privacy-preserving common-friend measurements to collect a small number of common-friend samples, and uses low-dimensional coordinates to estimate the number of common friends to other users. Simulation results on real-world social networks confirm that FDist is both scalable and accurate.