In a post yesterday, Saul Hansell wrote in The New York Times’ Bits Blog that Google and Yahoo are planning on using email as a backbone of a social environment. As a concluding thought he stated that, “running social networks is like starting nightclubs” and since Google and Yahoo already have hundreds of millions of customers, they “can get a fair number to stop and chat” in their new “nightclubs”. In an unrelated post, Jeff Pulver equates his recent net experience (thanks to Facebook and Twitter) to being inside “social media living room”. Indeed his subsequent description suggests what he really means is that even though he is in his living room, it is as if he is in a popular, public place where he can meet thousands of people. And he is inviting everyone to visit him there. For every thousand such people, there are people like Mark Evans, who would like to have a better control on their social graph. Mark not only wants to prune the tree to a manageable size, he wants the virtual graph to reflect only the graph that he has formed outside of the virtual social network. As Mark recounts it, Om Malik also expressed the same opinion. Some of the comments to his post seem to be in agreement.
For us at EnThinnai, this is a development we have been betting on. We felt that people will prefer to identify as “friends” whom they “know” otherwise. Accordingly, the application does not identify or locate the possible pool of friends. The users have to locate and identify them based on their contacts external to this application. We also feel that some of the potential friends may not prefer to use our application. Accordingly, we do not require the friends to be registered users of this application. Luckily for us, the user-centric identity mechanism OpenID allows us to meet this requirement. Even among friends, we suspect that users would like have much finer control on the information they share. This prompted us to allow our users to identify which friends can access each piece of data. These are some of our differentiators.
Update: I meant to add reference to one other item, but I omitted when I drafted this post. A couple of days back, Rich Tehrani observed that “… social networking sites are like the AOL for our children. They are an encapsulating experience which one might call AOL on steroids. It just goes to show you how cyclical ideas are in the computer space. We refer to a site like Facebook as a Web 2.0 site but it really isn’t anything more than an AOL experience with some fancy new features.” He further states that, “Remember convincing your mother and/or father that AOL was a crutch and you didn’t need it to surf the web or have an e-mail account?” We are hoping that EnThinnai is but a first attempt in migrating to the open Internet from a walled garden.