The idea of a "social" bittorrent client is not new in the sense that the Tribler client defines itself as a "social application" - see: http://www.tribler.org/.
I think tribler defines "social" as those who you have social ties to rather than those who you are geographically close to. It thus leverages "socialness" for security rather than speed.
I think the tribbler's definition is correct. In the modern era, we often don't have social ties to those geographically close to us. Duality should simply be called a "geo-aware" client - not a bad thing.
By the word social (and now I think it can mean different things in different context), I meant that it is based on the concept that there is content which is common to a given 'social' group -- let's say with your friends who use Linux, you can use it to download a 10 GB distro. The set of those friends forms a social group that will participate in downloading the distro. You are right about the 'geo-aware' part but then there is no geo-awareness; it's all manual.
I'm curious if you looked at Oneswarm[1], as it's built on the azureus platform (i.e. java) and utilizes PKI for authentication. It's not exactly lightweight, but I have setup ~30 friends, that I know and trust, on it in one tightly secure network.
For lightweight, on my router I have a transmission package (.opkg[2]) that handles files not available on my small network.
I think tribler defines "social" as those who you have social ties to rather than those who you are geographically close to. It thus leverages "socialness" for security rather than speed.
I think the tribbler's definition is correct. In the modern era, we often don't have social ties to those geographically close to us. Duality should simply be called a "geo-aware" client - not a bad thing.