Congratulations on becoming a registered user of EnThinnai. We are sure that you are attracted by one or more of its features - user-centric, privacy focused and ownership and portability of your data. To deliver on these, it uses some novel concepts and methods and differs from many of the messaging applications you may have used previously. We strongly recommend that you browse through this page to get the most out of this app.

EnThinnai allows you to store your contact information and Availability Status (also known as “mood message”). Your friends,based on the permissions you have set, can access these and can also initiate a real-time session with you.

Your first step is to populate your contact information and Availability Status. Next you will identify your friends by adding them one by one to the Buddy List. As you add a person to the Buddy List, you can specify the contact information that are allowed to access and also the mode(s) of communication session they can initiate with you.

It is probably worth to note the ways EnThinnai is different from other familiar messaging systems.

• Your friends can be registered users of your own instance, or another instance of EnThinnai. They may not be a registered user of any instance, but are uniquely identified by their email id. Lastly, they can be an unidentified, generic person. This may be useful if you want to allow a generic visitor to your website contact you to get additional information regarding your product/service, for example.
• Just because you have added another registered user to your Buddy List, does not mean that they have added you to theirs.
• There is no central repository of all registered users. They have to volunteer that information. You will build your list gradually and incrementally. Since adding a person to your list is just your decision and does not need concurrence from that person, the addition takes effect immediately.
• Your instance of EnThinnai is focused only on facilitating your friends to contact you. For sure, you can initiate a session with your friend (if they are a registered user), but then your instance is not involved; you are contacting your friend’s instance directly.
• Another unique feature is EnThinnai allows your unregistered friends to temporarily log into your instance as a guest user. If they have done so, you will be able to initiate a session with them.
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Now let us go into the individual features in some detail. Once you login you will view the dashboard from which you can access your information. The dashboard has two panes - the left pane lists your friends and your Availability Status. There is also an icon that displays connectivity status to the server. The right pane has tabular view to view different set of information.

Populate your contact list here, identified by their Open ID's in groups. This list enables you to exchange notes, share your status and contact information.

Share notes with and receive notes from buddies. Notes follow the policy of 'default deny', only your buddies can send you notes and vice versa. Buddy notes is where you see the list of notes sent to you and my notes lists the notes sent by you.

This is a simple file sharing mechanism, where you can share files with your buddies. This feature also follows 'default deny', only your contacts of your buddy list can receive files. Buddy files are where you see the list of files shared by your buddies and My files lists the files you shared with your buddies.

View the contact information shared by your buddies, only registered users of EnThinnai have the facility to share information.

Store all of your contact information here and share it with buddies. Only permitted buddies can view the information shared.

Maintains the list of accesses made to your status information.

Note: Just because they are in your buddy list does not imply that they have added you to their list. Being in the buddy list is not mutual.