This morning we opened up registration for a new and exciting web application we call EnThinnai. EnThinnai provides a simple way to store and share digital information with your friends and family, called buddies. You interact with EnThinnai via a simple unified UI to exchange with your buddies digital information like notes (think of whitelist based email), share files and contact information. At this point this description reads like any other social networking application. But EnThinnai has many differentiating features. Indeed even the motivational objectives are also different.
First let me describe the differentiating features of the deployed version. To begin with, EnThinnai uses OpenID for authentication. There is no need for your buddies also to be registered users of EnThinnai. The only requirement is that they have a valid OpenID. Thus you do not depend on the popularity of EnThinnai to realize the “networking effect”. Since many people have already an OpenID (even if they may not know of it), the networking effect OpenID is big.
Almost all social networking applications share, if to varying degree, your data with others. EnThinnai’s operating principle is “default deny” – stored information will be stored only with the people you explicitly identify. An implication of this is that you can not search EnThinnai to locate your potential buddies. You have to establish contact with a person outside the context of EnThinnai to exchange respective OpenIDs. Traditional social networking sites allow for one to form new friendship or to renew lost friendship. By necessity, they are public places like a bar. By design, EnThinnai is a private realm with a reach to the outside world – it is like your front porch (thinnai, in Tamil).
In most of the social networking applications, the buddy relationship is mutual – I can be your buddy only if you have agreed to be my buddy. Some new applications have recently introduced a concept called “follower” or “fan”, which is kind of one-sided relationship. In EnThinnai, the relationship is always one-sided (a mutual relationship is made up of two one-sided relationship). If I have declared you to be my buddy then it means that when you post a Note to me or share files with me, I will get a notification. You need not have declared me to be your buddy for you to send me a note.
I feel that EnThinnai is a better way to share the digital world with your established buddies. It also has lots of new and exciting technology that will allow its users to derive new benefits of IP Communications. I will elaborate on some of them in subsequent posts. Meanwhile, please register yourself and explore. What do you have got to lose and you will help us to test the application. We shall be indebted to you.
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How does enthinai compare with wuala? Besides easy URL availability? It seems like wuala offers some of the advantages of P2P. What is ent. magic sauce? OpenID?
First EnThinnai is more than file storage. If we restrict our attention to only the file storage aspect, the big difference is P2P vs C/S model. Even then that is not the full picture. One of our business plan calls for licensing EnThinnai and individuals or enterprises hosting it on their servers. So the real difference is that wuala is necessarily a community based service that users subscribe to and EnThinnai could be a product. (Granted that the current deployment is a service and not a product but that is for practical reasons.)
One of the magic sauces is certainly OpenID, but another one is our philosophical approach that exploits what OpenID entails.