Aswath Rao, one of the brightest minds in VoIP points me to a new web application called EnThinnai that offers many of the features of social networks. Aswath was kind enough to invite me to be one of the beta users back in March, but alas, it's one of the many things I'm asked to check out and alas it fell through the cracks. So many things to test, so little time.
In any event, as part of the EnThinnai team, Aswath emailed me recently to tell me that they are allowing the general public to register for the service and it will undergo public testing for a limited period.
Probably the best explanation of EnThinnai comes from here, which also explains the veranda/porch graphic above:
EnThinnai is your front porch on the web where you can store and display information that you can share with your designated buddies. From EnThinnai, you can exchange notes with your buddies, you can share files with them and you can tell them how they can contact you. Also, we will be adding other capabilities incrementally. In many respects, social networking sites offer many, if not all of the features. But in one respect, EnThinnai stands out: on other sites, your buddies have to belong to the network to be your buddy; that is not necessary in EnThinnai. If other social networking sites are like a bazaar or a bar where you meet your buddies, EnThinnai is the veranda in your house where you invite your buddies in. It is in this respect we call EnThinnai to be an un-"social networking" application.
One really cool thing about EnThinnai is that it leverages OpenID for the authentication. OpenID is an open, decentralized, free framework for user-centric digital identity. It appears EnThinnai also is leveraging Amazon EC2 and S3 for the storage and running the application. Amazon EC2 and S3 are a great way to host scalable applications with a lot of power and flexibility.
EnThinnai provides a simple way to store and share digital information with your friends and family.
• Share Notes, Files and Contact information
• Individualized permission settings
• Intuitive and straight forward UI design
• Use of OpenID for authentication
Future implementations will allow sharing of other forms of digital information while maintaining the same level of ease of use. A future release will also provide means for other applications to access your data using the recently released OAuth specification.
As soon as I recover from my Disney World vacation and catch up on things, I'll have to check out EnThinnai.
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