Note: This page is historical.

Current pages about Yenta are here. Please look at those pages first.

Yenta is still under active development, but this particular page is not. If you're interested in current research papers about Yenta, or obtaining a copy of Yenta, please start here instead.

This page is one of many that were written in late 1994 and early 1995, and are being preserved here for historical purposes. If you're viewing this page, you probably found it via an old link or are interested in the history of how Yenta came to be. These pages have not been actively maintained since 1995, so you'll find all sorts of older descriptions which may not match the current system, citations to old papers and old results, and so forth.

People will talk

Any communications medium, even if it was not originally designed for interpersonal communication, will eventually be used to accomplish it. There are a tremendous number of examples; what follows is just a sampling.

In the mid-1980's, Michael Mauldin wrote Gloria. Gloria had two lists. In list A were people with interesting .plan files, chosen by Mauldin's determination of whose were usually interesting. In list B were people who wanted to know about the .plan files from list A (chosen by people who asked to be added). Every Thursday, Gloria would mail all the changed .plan files from list A to everyone in list B (prefaced, of course, by "Sic transit Gloria thursdi"...)
After Gloria had been running for a while, however, conversations began to arise. Many users were on both lists; such users saw each other's changed .plan files every week. Eventually, they started carrying on obscure conversations via these interchanges, conversations that were readable by everyone else on the net if they knew who the two sides of the conversation were. (Regular readers of the list could generally figure it out.)
Almost as soon as certain MOOs had the capability to have verbs that could use the network, interMOO "telephones" began springing up.
Prodigy was based on the model of users downloading centrally-produced, advertiser-controlled pages of information. As soon as Prodigy allowed users to use email to communicate with each other, however, it found itself overwhelmed---the email traffic was far higher than the switches between Prodigy's processing nodes could handle, and contributed to a crisis in which Prodigy tried to cut the volume by charging for use.

Since, from the examples above and many more, it seems inevitable that users will invent ways to communicate with each other if there is not already a mechanism in place, it seems logical to explicitly include such a mechanism in Yenta.

Lenny Foner

Last modified: Tue Dec 13 21:30:25 1994