Decentralized and Distributed Photo Sharing on the Web

this is a crosspost coming from the Atomique blog

Yesterday I have handed in the mini-thesis covering my internship project: Decentralized and Distributed Photo Sharing on the Web (PDF) and this is the abstract:

Tagging-based communities allowing users to share, organize, and explore resources such as photos and bookmarks have pioneered the combination of social networking and resource sharing. Formerly rather tiresome activities such as annotating information sources have been transformed to ways of connecting and interacting with other people. Resource sharing in a community environment allows contributors to engage in conversation, play, and challenges. However, most resource-sharing communities have architectural and institutional shortcomings due to their usually centralized, restricted, and profit-driven nature. Users do not have control over the community’s policies, functionality, or appearance. The social aspects created between contributors are locked within a community, while it is usually not possible to interact with users from other communities.

In this report, a decentralized approach towards photo sharing is introduced allowing for community and conversation while fostering access to shared photos and empowerment of users. This concept draws insight from a diverse set of disciplines including information retrieval, databases, distributed computing, interaction design, and psychology. A web-based photo repository is conceptualized employing tagging as a classification scheme. Established standards and protocols of the blogosphere are used to provide for decentralized photo sharing in groups.

A prototype photo repository allowing for decentralized photo sharing was implemented. An overview of this software and its functionality is given, and challenges throughout the implementation phase are presented, including considerations regarding presentation, interaction, uploading, syndication, and photo sharing groups. The document ends with a summary and a discussion of the results including an outlook to potential future work.