salvo told me that foursquare had one of
its databases overloaded with check-ins and consequently experienced a downtime of 11 hours! so central services are unscalable (unreliable) and they need to be decentralized. partial decentralization is the solution in the industry, and full decentralization still remains in the academic circles ($$ reasons). few years ago, i asked the question: what if mobile social-networking services were to be decentralized. it was an academic exercise that resulted in:
- Problem statement: Tapping the Mobile Digital Tapestry: Can mobile 2.0 companies make money without being greedy for personal data?
- Preliminary solutions: Selecting trustworthy content using tags (from Sect 2.3 onwards)