Emergent Social Networking with LOAF

John Sequeira writes about Loaf :
LOAF is a simple extension to email that lets you append your entire address book to outgoing mail message without compromising your privacy. Correspondents can use this information to prioritize their mail, and learn more about their social networks. The LOAF home page is at http://loaf.cantbedone.org.

Why do I like LOAF?



It's emergent: You don't need to maintain explicit links to people in your network, it's mined from your address book



The user owns the data. No need to assign ownership of your friends to an aggregating monetizing marketing web site.


It answers a question that will become more and more vital as details of our life are increasingly digitized: how do you share these details without losing your privacy? It's not clear to me how many data types the Bloom Filters could be extended to, but as a proof-of-concept I think it's great.