Giving form to social cloud storage through experimentation: Issues and insights

• To define and explore a social cloud for storage.
• Impact of network topology/user availability on a social cloud storage service.
• We implement a hybrid model (contributory storage/cloud service) in FriendBox.
• Trade-offs between service quality and economic cost in a social cloud.
• Alternative mechanisms to make a fairer use of user resources.

In the last few years, we have seen a rapid expansion of social networking. Digital relationships between individuals are becoming capital for turning to one another for communication and collaboration. These online relationships are creating new opportunities to define socially oriented computing models. In this paper, we propose to leverage these relationships to form a dynamic “social cloud” for storage. While at first glance, the concept of social cloud looks very appealing, a deeper analysis brings out many problems, particularly in data availability. To overcome this issue, in addition to digital friends, we propose to the members of the social cloud the use of online storage services like Amazon S3 to store data and improve data availability. Through a real deployment in our campus, we study what aspects give form to the definition of social cloud storage and determine the difficulty of realizing this concept in the real world. Our analysis reveals interesting insights of how to reap the full potential of socially oriented storage.