EnThinnai Directory is not Your Father’s Directory
Apr 1st, 2008 by Aswath
After a post by Daniel Berninger on directories and my direct response in how EnThinnai has implemented directory, Tom Evslin has spelled out his views on how to design what he calls an (un)social directory. Since his description of how a directory should work is close to what we have implemented in EnThinnai and his curious moniker is close to mine “un-social network”, a closer comparison of the two line of thinking is called for.
Tom states at the outset that in his thinking the concept of directory is complete inverse of the traditional directory. He says that instead of storing our friends’ contact information, he will store his contact information and will allow others to access it in real-time under the control of a permission based rules engine. This is EXACTLY what we do in EnThinnai and we had implemented it even in a mockup that is two years old.
Next he goes through the mechanics: “We now each have two entries in our personal directory. The contact entry I use to reach you has nothing but permissions in it and the address of your contact page (which I can’t see but can get connected to you through). The other entry is the permissions I granted you which are to a subset of the possible ways to reach me.” In EnThinnai, we will store for each contact information a permission list identifying the list of people who can access that contact information and the address of your contact page. But we do not store your permissions. It is not clear why he does it either. After all he suggests that you will be able to change the permissions dynamically. I suspect that it is an editorial mistake. So he is storing the same set of information as we do in EnThinnai.
The mechanics one will use in his description is also the same we do in EnThinnai: when I want to contact you, I will visit your contact page and after authenticating myself, I will receive all the modes of communication I am allowed to have with you for that time. Then I can pick one that is most agreeable for my purposes.
He promises to deliver on the upcoming nirvana. But the nirvana is here already and is operational now for a year. Furthermore we have been adding specific communication modes. From the beginning, we have provided an email equivalent, but with no spam. In Spring VON, I introduced the ability to do text chat. In a short order we will provide voice and video capability. In Fall VON, I even introduced what a future business card will look like.
But even in technical details, there some differences. EnThinnai does not require everybody to be running this application. If I want to share my contact information with you, it is not necessary that you also should have installed EnThinnai. It is enough that I have. Tom says that findability is also coming. EnThinnai does not offer that. It has to be done outside of EnThinnai. If I am going to share contact information only to identified persons, what good is it a third person finds out where my contact page is located? I suppose I could make one of the contact information public to the whole world. But that is not what we do in EnThinnai.
Of course there is one fundamental difference. I surmise from Dan’s comment FWD is planning on a central gatekeeper; we plan to license the software that can be installed in distributed servers. We truly believe that there is no need for a Middle.