OK… the social networking phenomenon has screamed again. This time, orkut. [Read the CJNET article.]
Personally, i’d like to see where they’re going with this. As it stands, it doesn’t look much different than any of the other YASNS pieces and there are still kinks that are irritating. But one thing’s for sure… if Google can’t figure out how to optimize a network computationally, no one can.
I’m just still so uncertain about sites that do explicit articulated networks. And i’m certainly not motivated to contact friends and beg them to join. Of course, if you’re on there and want to find me, i’m using the name i use for all sites that refuse lower case names.
Update: Please note that i’m purposely not commenting on Orkut for a few days. Of course, i’d love to hear your thoughts, but i’m holding my tongue for a bit.
One thing that I did like is that you can give your friends props, both publicly (in testimonials and declaring fandom) and privately (those weird karma things). At least he understood the need for discretion on who is rating whom as sexy, etc.
Check this out from a slashdot comment: “In finnish, the word ‘orkut’ is the plural form of the slang word for orgasm.” (I realize it’s also an engineer’s name)
man… Orkut has got problems… they should open-source the code so that we could mess with it! (an unreasonable request I’m sure)
Orkut is the personal project of an engineer at Google, first name “Orkut”. It’s interesting, however, to watch tens of weblogs call it “Google’s this” and “Google’s that”. There appears to be a presumption floating around right now that Google asked Orkut to work on this project; as I understand it, that’s false.
Doesn’t Google ask all their engineers to devote a little bit of time to personal projects… which is what orkut is… and the terms of service/ privacy policy are straight out of Google’s book… right down to DMCA 512 safe harbor procedures. That’s why I call it “Google’s this…” … not to mention the “in affiliation with Google” footer at the bottom of each page…
Hey Zeph! I’m going to make a list of what I think could be improved with orkut and I’ll post it here and on my blog tomorrow morning…
Orkut’s got too much quantification. Lists of friends are ordered by how many friends they have (the cool kids are the whuffie-magnets at the top). Karma icons (what is this, the care bears?) appear only after some threshold of friends contribute some threshold of coolness. Most appallingly, you need to be invited to join, amounting to the worst social quantification of them all: binary. (Tho, maybe the invite thing is only during beta. I dunno.) Slick site. What Friendster should have been. But still smacks of high school cliques. All the marginalized geeks have come back 10, 20 years later to marginalize the non-geeks. Liberals become conservative, etc, etc, all predictable outcomes of the arc of social maturation.
can someone invite me ? i wanna see 🙂