For the past couple of days, there has been a lot of chatter about OpenSocial from Google. People have focused on how developers can write applications once and run it in multiple social networks ("containers"). Some have suggested that this falls short, because the ultimate goal is to knock down the vertical silos created by each of the social networks. What is required is for the development of an open container that pulls data from all the individual social networks and present list of friends, feeds etc and displays in this container. At the same time, this container must allow for one to post to one or more social networks. This way one does not have to visit multiple social networks. This can be achieved by properly using OpenSocial API and OAuth.
EnThinnai addresses this problem in a different way. It will allow a user to maintain her "social graph" in her server; will notify new information to the affected friends; will retrieve information from friends from their servers. This way we truly knock down vertical silos and allow users to take the ownership back from social network providers. Of course the current version of EnThinnai does not provide distributed servers; but otherwise realizes other objectives. Please register for EnThinnai and explore its features and services.
Posted by aswath at November 3, 2007 04:07 PM