Yenta has been developed by Lenny Foner (with lots of help and suggestions from others), as part of a doctoral dissertation in the Software Agents group of the MIT Media Lab.
You can find various papers, reports, and a dissertation about Yenta here. That page also includes information about how to get on various Yenta-related mailing lists -- starting Yenta up for the first time will also offer to put you on these lists.
There are three major motivations for this work:
Technical. Yenta attempts to advance the state of the art in building distributed, decentralized, multi-agent systems. There are a number of problems to be addressed in making these sorts of applications, especially if one cares about protecting people's privacy at the same time.
Sociological. The net is a big place, and it's sometimes difficult to find the communities you'd like to find. As the net gets bigger and the signal-to-noise ratio decreases, this seems to be getting even harder. Investigating how Yenta can help, and also how people use its built-in reputation system, could be very interesting.
Political. Too many systems that handle personal information think about privacy and civil liberties issues last, when it's too late to fix often horrendous gaffes in these areas. This project is an attempt to show that it's possible to build such a such in which privacy issues are taken seriously. Such care to protect civil liberties can also greatly increase the robustness of the system, as perceived by its users, because they know they won't be surprised by a having their personal information unexpectedly revealed, whether legally or not. Yet building robust, secure, private, and distributed systems requires strong cryptography, so part of the motivation here is also to show that strong cryptography is not just for the "bad guys," whatever your definition of "bad guys" might be. In other words, strong cryptography is not just for hiding illegal behavior, or moving money around; there are plenty of other uses, too.
[ I'm still curious! Tell me more! See the next page. ]