  Many decentralized online social networks (DOSNs) have been proposed due to
an increase in awareness related to privacy and scalability issues in
centralized social networks. Such decentralized networks transfer processing
and storage functionalities from the service providers towards the end users.
DOSNs require individualistic implementation for services, (i.e., search,
information dissemination, storage, and publish/subscribe). However, many of
these services mostly perform social queries, where OSN users are interested in
accessing information of their friends. In our work, we design a socially-aware
distributed hash table (DHTs) for efficient implementation of DOSNs. In
particular, we propose a gossip-based algorithm to place users in a DHT, while
maximizing the social awareness among them. Through a set of experiments, we
show that our approach reduces the lookup latency by almost 30% and improves
the reliability of the communication by nearly 10% via trusted contacts.
