Introducing Loaf (Idle Words)#

03.18.2004

For the past few days, Joshua Schachter and I have been working on a neat application of Bloom filters, an ancient and underappreciated algorithm from the days when men were men, women were women, and computers read data from perforated stone tablets.

The fruit of our labors is a little social network extension to email we call Loaf. You might say it's a breadfruit.

Configure Loaf on your machine, and suddenly you are attaching your address book to every outgoing message. And through the miracle of 1970's computer science, you're doing it in a way that doesn't completely destroy your privacy.

Loaf tells you whether strangers sending you email are people that your friends know. And it can tell you a little bit about the structure of your own social network. And it can probably be used in cool ways that haven't occurred to us yet.

For the moment, Loaf is just a reference implementation for Unix systems, and we need serious hackers to help us write email plugins and installers for the rest of the world. But a friendlier, happier Loaf should be just around the corner. You can read all about the project and track its progress at loaf.cantbedone.org.