Findability and EnThinnai
Apr 3rd, 2008 by Aswath
Tom Evslin continues to add further details to the (Un)Social Directory that is under development at FWD. In today’s post, he explains the reasons for findability feature and how it may work. The reasons for findability are elemental: after all we are all social creatures and are interested in interacting with others. Permission based communication is a defensive reaction to incessant unwanted communication. FWD, assisted by other social networks and armed with self accumulated social graph information of its members will assist you in determining the level of permissibility of a new contact. This is their current thinking and Tom is looking for your input.
Our thoughts are different and our position is clear. The need for findability is real but it is out of scope for EnThinnai. EnThinnai is an application running on your server and serving your needs. Since it is individually focused and under individual control, we can not have a picture of the global social graph. So our users have to look elsewhere when a long lost friend is trying to reestablish a connection. A central component of un-social networks or user-centric social networks is user-centric identity. iName is one such identity scheme. Most of the iName providers offer a “contact” service. It “is a way for you to put a link on your web pages or on your business card that allows people to contact you, without exposing your email address to spammers.” Analogously other ID providers could also offer such a service as well. Armed with my OpenID, a new contact can contact me through this service, providing her EnThinnai particulars and adding me in her permission list. Then I will be able to visit her EnThinnai and initiate the communication. Subsequently, I could add her to my permission list and close the loop.
This method addresses the need for allowing contact establishment without violating the privacy model of EnThinnai and its distributed nature.