Data Storage for Social Networks: A Socially Aware Approach

Evidenced by the success of Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, online social networks (OSNs) have become ubiquitous, offering novel ways for people to access information and communicate with each other. As the increasing popularity of social networking is undeniable, scalability is an important issue for any OSN that wants to serve a large number of users. Storing user data for the entire network on a single server can quickly lead to a bottleneck, and, consequently, more servers are needed to expand storage capacity and lower data request traffic per server. Adding more servers is just one step