"A Multi-Agent, Referral Based Matchmaking System"

From http://foner.www.media.mit.edu/people/foner/yenta-brief.html""

[Yenta] provides privacy-protected, distributed, automatic generation of clusters of users who are interested in similar topics. This is a sort of coalition-building or matchmaking system. These clusters then serve as the basis for introducting users to each other. Users can send messages to particular other users, or to everyone in the cluster. In addition to its obvious role in introducing people who have never met, Yenta can serve in another role: finding people in the same organization, perhaps only a few offices away from each other, who should have known that they are working on similar projects or with similar tools, but didn't, because it never occurred to either party to mention it to the other.

Every user runs their own copy of Yenta, and the various Yentas communicate with each other, arranging introductions and passing messages. Personal information is tightly protected, without requiring large amounts of trust either in the network or in any Yenta not under your own control. The eventual goal is the ubiquitous distribution of Yenta across the Internet.

I found this project interesting because it seeks to "automatically" match users with similar interests. While I'm skeptical of the usefulness of fully-automatic matchmaking, I think similar systems could greatly help human matchmakers. (The need for a special client is also a big problem--one of wikis' strengths is their SimpleBrowserRequirement.) --CliffordAdams