"1) What the hell is up with the elitist approach to invitation? That's just outright insulting and an attempt to pre-configure the masses through what the technorati are doing. Social networks are not just a product of technologists. Everyone has a social network and what they do with it is quite diverse. To demand that they behave by the norms of technologists is horrifying."

Amen. It *is* off-putting. I am still waiting for someone to extend an invitation to me, so I can take a look at Orkut myself. But from what I'm reading in your post today, and in your compilation of others' comments (thanks!), it would seen that I'm not missing a helluva lot.

Oh, what the hell, invite me anyways.... I've now been fully forewarned on what to expect.

Use email: ryanschultz@hotmail.com

--Ryan Schultz

Yawn.

I just launched the public Beta of SongBuddy, YASNS, which addresses some of your complaints:
1 and 2 just don't apply,
3 - I think the language needs to evolve a buzzword to describe how social networks link people. I haven't addressed this, using "friends" and "fans" for now, but am giving it some thought.
4 - I'm actually working on the crowd metaphor for the site, what bad behavior does it incite?
5 - SongBuddy is the first network I've heard of that does something other than saying here's a list of your friends friends, it builds a directory of their favorite music that you can listen to. We need more social networks actually DOING things.
6 - INSERT NORMAL MICROSOFT BASHING :)
7 - Not only is all the data on SongBuddy licensed under the Creative Commons, but we also export it as FOAF so that anyone can build on it. We'll also be digesting other sites' FOAFs soon, which means you'll be able to bring your friendlist to and from SongBuddy.

I genuinely wanted to address and discuss what you said in your post, but if this comes off as comment spam feel free to delete it.

Invitation only has some good points. It means the people who join are probably connecting to some pre-existing social network, other people they already know. I'd summarize the problem as the fact that it's binary (the same issue you pointed out with being someone's friend, or fan). You either are or aren't invited, or a friend, or a fan. So either you are forced to choose a cutoff point which will invariably insult someone, or you just "befriend" everyone because the concept has become virtually meaningless. This is made worse by the fact that friends lists are visible.

What I find interesting is how everyone is suddenly ganging up on Orkut, Friendster, etc. Yes, it/they have their problems, but the snowballing recent criticism of this genre has taken on a life of its own. It's as if the "Heathers" (socially-perceptive popular kids who rule through leading the group's exclusion behavior) have clued in to the idea that Orkut, the new kid, would be an easy target-- and now everyone else is jumping in to pick on it as well. (Not that they aren't also providing intelligent and useful criticism along the way.)

I have to agree -- most of the criticisms I've seen of Orkut to date have been along the lines of "The food is TERRIBLE! And the portions are so small!"

I for one want an invite to try and digest what the heck Orkut has that everyone else is missing. *Send me an invite please!* As far as innovation is concerned the real innovation in this is being able to take the whole thing mobile! Taking it with you to meetings and to conferences where you can meet a new person and establish instant credibility through FOAF.

To clarify my previous: I don't think that a backlash / lynch-mob mentality is a problem per se. The question is, what is it directed towards and where do you go with it?

The thing I don't get about the whole ratings system is that there is no reason why you shouldn't give all your friends maximum points, and you will give them high ratings, because they're your friends. It's like a bad implementation of Cory Doctorow's Whuffie -- but I'm not sure that I would want good implementation either unless that act of rating was implicit in some other action. Technorati ranking, for example, feels like a good system, even though it's one-dimensional, because my explicit action is one of linking, not rating. It also has more credibility than your # of friends, because it indicates that, not only do I know you, but I listen to what you have to say.

And fans? At first it seemed kinda of interesting, as well as appropriate for say someone like danah, or Joi, or Orkut, or anybody else that's prominent enough in a community. But for the other 99% of the people on orkut that spend their lives living below the radar, it comes across as weird, awkward, and stalker-ish: "Hi, you have a not-so-secret admirer."

I just got rid of all my fans after talking to you the other day... stupid shit.

hmmm, I thought you could be a fan of someone you weren't friends with. I had seen an example of this earlier, where one guy went around and made himself a fan of all the women with cute profile photos (I tested my hypothesis by clicking on female profiles and seeing if he was listed). But that account got reset, so I guess it wasn't really a feature.

Isn't this just an experiment with a beta-version social network engine? I assumed the features weren't that big a deal. If I was Google, I would build something that would scale quickly with enough features to create some degree of complexity, so I could play with the database and indexes.

You're ranting about a FOAF service that's in beta. I mean... what were you expecting when you signed up? Maybe i've just managed to keep my expectations so low that i've managed to not be disappointed. I saw Friendster as one huge suckassfest and stayed away. orkut is like a Friendster with a more intelligent infrastructure. That's it. The suck still pervades it and will continue to pervade it because that is its nature. I reiterate: what did you want?

You complain that it's invitation only; i say, "Hey, it's in BETA." Beta tests are usually limited in scope. 2 through 5 (and, to some degree, 7) are clearly misfeatures that you could, possibly, suggest to Orkut as things to fix or work on. 6 is contradictory; you complain that it's broken even as you acknowledge it's not a "production" site. If you aren't interested in helping to make it work, then you shouldn't be on a beta site.

Itamar - Invite-only means that everyone must be connected to the core cluster, those directly involved with Google. That's not very democratizing.

rone - What's a beta with users in the five digits? If you let something spread that far, it's not a beta... it's a pop culture meme. I can guarantee you that most people aren't there to help; they're there because they're curious. Wallop is a beta.

Paul - i've been ranting about the YASNS phenomenon since March. There are lots of places to go with the rants. One of the obvious is to address the concerns, the failures, etc. I've helped out with lots of companies working on this stuff.

Yeah... I thought about being your fan for a second... then it occured to me that that is kind of creepy and if I think you're cool I can just tell you myself. I'm keeping my fan selections minimal.

Regarding 1 and 6, I think they intended for it to be beta, and intended for the invite-only thing to keep it from growing too fast, but we all can see that didn't work.

Regarding the bug with the email addresses, and the terms of service... that is scary and I'm taking my link to my blog off my profile now.

"And what the hell are you supposed to DO once you get on the damn thing?"

Perhsp you're bedazzled by all your purported bells and whistles.

"I know it's an alpha..."(followed by classic whining of someone who forgets what they just said).

If you venture beack, I suggest you read *this* rant:

http://www.orkut.com/CommMsgs.aspx?cmm=1328&tid=3

"And what the hell are you supposed to DO once you get on the damn thing?"

Perhsp you're bedazzled by all your purported bells and whistles.

"I know it's an alpha..."(followed by classic whining of someone who forgets what they just said).

If you venture back, I suggest you read *this* rant:

http://www.orkut.com/CommMsgs.aspx?cmm=1328&tid=3

My biggest problem with Orkut is that it mixes social networking with dating too much. Why should I know that my business aquaintance X has an open marriage? I think that if you do not list yourself as desiring a relationship using the system, that information should not be asked for (or revealed).

Other problems are things like being able to ask someone "Why are you requesting to be my friend?". I've now got two requests from people I don't think I know, but who knows, they might be fans of my blog. There are lots of other places like this -- why doesn't the system ask me for some text when I click on an existing user's "add as a friend" button so that I can say hi in the welcome message?

There are lots of little things like this, not big technical problems, but things that do require careful social thinking before implementation.

In my view, it doesn't matter how many people have joined, or that the majority of the people there aren't there with the intention to beta test. The point is that they SHOULD be. orkut is a fun toy at the moment and we need to play with it, and if it's broken, we tell the people who make it. But this venting (not just yours, but the beating it's taking everywhere) really smacks of "How DARE they not meet my standards! Don't they know who i am??"

If you find that orkut is the sort of tool you'd like to use if only it sucked a little less, then work with the makers to improve it. Punishing it in public is useless.

And let's drop this "democratizing" crap. The Internet and all of its various subsystems (the Web, Usenet, etc.) are not a democracy, and they never were. It is (and always was) a foolish expectation and it needs to be dropped.

Well, the invitation-only thing might have been an elitist approach. On the other hand, it might have been an attempt to limit both the number and nature of the beta testers. And still again, it might have been just a brilliant marketing ploy. Anyway, that exclusivity didn't last long.

I agree with all the rest of your rant. Also, their terms show contempt for business users, too:

"The orkut.com service is made available for your personal, non-commercial use only. Businesses, organizations or other legal entities may not use the orkut.com service for any purpose."

Yet, you can put "business networking" as one of your reasons for being there?!? So, if I happen to have a corporation instead of a sole proprietorship, I can't talk business on the site?!? Utter nonsense.

Anyway, Orkut highlights in a big way the need for segmentation and boundaries. Within hours after joining, I had someone wanting to be my friend whose entire profile consisted of variations on the word "piss". Lovely.

Needless to say, this type of environment will NEVER have any appeal to mainstream business users.

I shouldn't have commented on a value judgement with a technical argument, yeah. So to restate as a motivational theory - most of the choices Orkut made might be due to wanting to easily extract meaningful marketing data. This can explain things ranging from "invitation only" (google employees' friends probably tend to have disposable income, so social coherence is a plus) to the way friends linking works and the information you are able to enter. In which case the elitism is a result of the implementors' perception of the dictates of the Business Plan.

uhhh- how about... DOn't use it!

Invitation-only is a convenient way of making sure the graph of all users remains connected. There are good reasons for enforcing that constraint that have nothing to do with elitism.

Of course, you're always welcome to build your own service for the excluded masses.

I totally missed the part where someone put a gun to your head and MADE you sign up for this FREE service.

Also, anyone that actually uses the term "technocrati" in a serious sentence loses all credibility in my book.

I'm glad y'all want to take the time to read my rants, and even better that you post (even if anonymously). But you should probably realize that i'm an academic. I STUDY things. Right now, i've been studying online social network services. No one put a gun to my head to join any given service. I do this as a researcher. I write rants for the random folks who want to listen to them (and to vent my inner demons in an unconstrained form since academic papers require a lot more framing of the discussion).

So stop telling me to shut up and stop using the thing. If you don't want to hear my rants, don't read em.

Hmmm... well, I, for one, appreciate your rants. However, I almost think that some of the features in Orkut are *fishing* for strong reactions. I mean, some of this stuff is too dorky to be true. Rating your friends as fun, cool or sexy? Ick! But it would fit in with the Google model to just try it and see what kind of reaction they get-- to get numbers to back up their design intuitions, and to use people's reactions to design better categories. I mean, when is a service with a 5 digit user population still Beta? When a company's user testing model relies on presenting minute changes to small percentages of a large user pool as a basis for their design decisions.

As for the exclusivity-- I think it's Orkut's way, for now, of preventing "fake people" from being added to the site and contaminating their data. If there are only people who are linked to people at Google, the developers have some way of making sure that the web they get-- articulated or no--is a reflection of real-world networks instead of imaginary-world networks. It actually suggests that *somebody* is interested in this for the data, not just for the business opportunity.

Zephoria - What's a beta with users in the five digits? If you let something spread that far, it's not a beta..

Er, why? Currently it's under 20000 people (if I read it correctly). I think that's a piddlingly small number. Assuming that part of what they are testing is how it travels as it grows it makes no sense to limit growth or to suddenly declare it as non-beta once it passes a certain mark.

Personally I like Google's brand of wide beta testing. See news.google.com, still in beta and yet highly useful, even if the occasional article shows up with the wrong picture or in the wrong place.

As a self proclaimed "academic" I find your first point very strange. From an academic perspective I'd expect that seeing how Orkut grows from it's initial seed state to be very interesting. I hope Orkut present some sort of data on how the network grew and changed. To proclaim that it is some attempt to "preconfigure the masses" (whatever that means) is ludicrous. It's just a starting point. How it grows from there depends on real social networks. Will it initially grow faster amoung the more technologically inclined? Of course (not least of all because they are more likely to check their email once every five minutes rather than let the invite sit on their email server for a day before looking at it) but that isn't something you can adjust for.

Orkut is part toy, part experiment and part something useful. No matter what they change or how much they tweak (as they surely will be doing) it will always be part toy, part experiment and part something useful. It will never be a "perfect" representation of the real world. It won't bring us a socialising nirvana. It won't be the ultimate answer to any particular problem. There's a lot of things it won't do. But that isn't the point really. It does more than it would do if it wasn't there.

And Gollum's profile is worth a chuckle.

"Invitation-only is a convenient way of making sure the graph of all users remains connected. There are good reasons for enforcing that constraint that have nothing to do with elitism."

I don't want to express a stance on this whole orkut issue either way, lest somebody take my comment the wrong way and start flaming, but one thing about this statement that I feel I should point out is that not everybody is connected as one giant network. If that were the case, then the little message on the home page about being connected to X number of users through Y friends would match up with the total number of orkut users (which you can find out by doing a search with no parameters set). At this point, there are about 3000 users that I'm not connected to.

Another Orkut rant

I'm tempted to agree with 404notfound. Google's strength as a business model thus far has been it's interest in a wide number of internet functions (absorbing Blogger, for instance) to experiment with how these affect the flow of information around the web, and how Google can expand on them. That said, I've yet to see Orkut in all it's primitive glory, but from your description it is in dire need of more fine tuning (friend/fan certainly seems a strange pair of categories with which to assess all the people you know personally).

Also, pathetic loser that I am, this is my attempt to seek an invitation. If any Orkut users are feeling generous, send one my way.

this is all very interesting for me to read... i'm not an engineer and i haven't been invited to Orkut ;)

The opening statement on this site is a tryout for some "un-named" fraud attempting to pose as an intellectual. Yeah, you think too much, like myself sometimes, but what do you add to it (maybe the same to any other curiosity you encounter) CONTEMPT? ...If it's interesting enough to capture your attention and disdain, be worthy of oppinions by suggesting fixes rather.
-Iddentify yourself or be ignored for lack of backbone.
Take it from me, in my buisness, (latenight entertainment etc.} it can be time saving and productive to weed-out all the non-biz individuals trying to break thier way in, from the circle of expierienced pros you want to meet.

The opening statement on this site is a tryout for some "un-named" fraud attempting to pose as an intellectual. Yeah, you think too much, like myself sometimes, but what do you add to it (maybe the same to any other curiosity you encounter) CONTEMPT? ...If it's interesting enough to capture your attention and disdain, be worthy of oppinions by suggesting fixes rather.
-Iddentify yourself or be ignored for lack of backbone.
Take it from me, in my buisness, (latenight entertainment etc.} it can be time saving and productive to weed-out all the non-biz individuals trying to break thier way in, from the circle of expierienced pros you want to meet.

There are just as many 'Heathers' on Wikipedia, applying social criteria to destroy the serious encyclopedia purpose of that project.

The phenomena is known as "sysop vandalism", and some services using similar software seem quite determined to avoid it

http://consumerium.org/wiki/wiki.phtml?title=sysop_vandalism

There's a lot of good general discussion of the issues there at Consumerium, where they plan a form of social software that will attract lots of highly motivated and outside-funded attackers.

Accordingly, it will be where the principles of social network service cohesion will be proven, or proven wrong. Very very highly recommended. And an extremely worthy project besides.

Having an objective other than 'hanging out' is a pre-requisite for growing actual respect for others. Consumerium satisfies that criteria. Wikipedia used to, but now does not. And orkut and friendster never did.

At least it's a cleaner, faster who's who's of the web (with actual photographs!) than could be nabbed previously.

hey mebbe it's a troll..mebbe you're doing just what they want you to do. Does opening your mouth spread the cold? I suppose if you just calm down and take it for what it is, it will all fall into perspective.
Mebbe it's like an episode of "Home Movies"
6 months it'll all be a.... nothing.
How many participatory(??) websites endured? The internet has done a wonderful job of giving certain kinds of people a life, whether its enriching or not remains to be seen, I guess the question is: Are you one of them?

I'm still trying to understand why this is even worth venting 'against'. It's a community website. You link to your friends and they link to theirs. And that's about it. As far as I know no puppies were injured in the process. Chill. ;-P

I´ve been thrown out of orkut two times the last
three days without any explanation at all.
help@orkut.com and support@orkut.com won´t
answer, and orkut@stanford.edu definately won´t ! :) To me it´s extremely antisocial to invite people to a community and then throw them
out without any explanation, I´d say it´s worse
than antisocial. In any other social context it would be closer to sociopathological and in any case extremely rude. I wonder if it reflects the minds of the people who run orkut ?

Whew! Am I glad I trusted my gut instinct and declined the two invitations I got. I did go as far as looking at the entrance page where I was supposed to say I'd sign on, but the stupid questionnaire was enough to put me off forever. I never fill out marketing surveys or anything with those robotic questions meant for sheep. No, sorry, that's an insult to sheep.

There is an APOPHENIA of global dimensions recorded in www.religionsAREone.com:

Although we have thought that the intervals among the six monotheistic religions are random, because we were all taught that religions are utterly disconnected and incompatible with any ordered and related calendrical progression,they are, nevertheless, MORE than interrelated:

They are of ONE numerical entity. They are actually all products or sums of 2520, the most unique number in our digital system! The Cosmic Painter has drawn the intervals among the six historic monotheistic religions in an order of digital symmetry, numerical symmetry and historical symmetry, and no one has ever pointed it out until a layman posted www.religionsAREone.com

Juel
Juel Design Studio.

There's something I don't get...
Why isn't there some site where you can get automatically invited to this "secret society" ?Hasn't anyone been able to crack the system and blow it wide open, provoke a reaction from Google, to see if it indeed is the can of worms of bad intentions as many suspect?

There's something I don't get...
Why isn't there some site where you can get automatically invited to this "secret society" ?Hasn't anyone been able to crack the system and blow it wide open, provoke a reaction from Google, to see if it indeed is the can of worms of bad intentions as many suspect?

To the author of "venting my contempt for orkut"

STFU. You sound like a real loser.

Why don't YOU go and write some code and come up with something that you think is better than orkut?

It's always easier to critisize, isn't it?

You're a fucking loser with a big "L".

EMD: http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2004/02/19/why_i_dont_build_right_now.html

Thanks for stopping by and taking the time to harass instead of taking the time to offer any constructive information.

I heard of Orkut today. I can't think of anything more arbitrary. It seems to simply be a list of people you know through degrees of separation.
Reading over the posts here, I see so many people saying things like: "I'd like to get an invite to see what its all about" WTF?? How did this happen? It seems that everyone's meme filters have gone out of control..

The idiot monkey mentality that drives these things, the grasping-for-meaning-in-other-people fraudulence, the self-indulgent social-humanistic wankery.. Its all getting a little too much. Why don't you fucking idiots do something external instead of creating cyber-enclaves?

Orkut sucks

I just found out and signed up for orkut right now. Some quick impressions... A little better, a little worse than friendster for interface, groups etc. But no new paradigms, other than the invitation-only aspect, which has probably thrilled a whole of technorati and explains why there are so many people that I sort of know already signed up.

So, the question is, why bother to sign up, if nothing is really new? If you've already filled out your lengthy form for match.com or friendster or whatever, why do it again? Perhaps the invitation-only aspect is signficant; an exclusive club has more control over the tone that is set, but this only could continue only as long as the community stays small. I'm still waiting for the social network that I will have a use for, once I'm done playing with it.

Zephoria, i agree with most of your critique.
1) Invitation: It just makes sure that there are people that you know already - and it's a marketing trick: increase attraction through limitation.
3) friend to be fan: must be a bug ;)
5) Connect to people with similar interests, communities, of course its another medium, besides our mail accounts, mobile, SMS, etc. and that sucks ...
7) Agree, though a few lines below the statement they own everything, they deny it again. That's how i understood it.

There went a lot of work into the conception and implementation of Orkut, though it doesn't look like much. I assume it is really beta as most functions are quite rudimentary (as you say), some even misleading and others not very consistent (for example there should be a separation between "friends" and business" contacts; that you have to click on "edit profile" two times and that there are different stages, though redundant, quite confusing; there is a also a confusion between "search" in the navigation menu, the search in "friend finder" and "add a new friend", among others you mentioned) i think this is due to the fact that its still in beta, an experimental phase - with more, and better conceived functions in the future. 2) Time will tell if the ratings (cool, ...) and "fan" functions make sense; it's part of the maturing of the system (of the whole genre) and adds the necessary playfulness. Once people are tired of it it will disappear ... For the guys that coded it these are just minor conceptional bugs. IMHO

On why I didn't join orkut.

For me the internet is a place to meet people I don't know and possibly will never meet. Giving informations about myself to be used by google? Signing a contract with them and agreeing for them to use anything I post as they wish? No thanks. Not in my lifetime.

There are healthier ways to socialise without having to ask Google.

I've had some invites to Orkut, but didn't bother after my two-day experience with Friendster. I have lots of friends already and I'm not a lonley, socially awkward person. But on Friendster, I suddenly was. I hated trying to represent myself with a photograph (which one to pick?) and reducing my existence to books and music other people wrote. Everyone in it seemed egotistical, spastic or boring. I was embarrassed for my friends as they each fell into these categories. Also, I have plenty of friends that I wouldn't recommend as friends or for relationships. "He's cool, but he's unstable and smells really bad" or, "I've known her since 5th grade, but she's irritating and lies about being able to play guitar." I finally quit after two days when I logged in and was informed that I was connected to 7,000 and some people. I already felt ridiculous, but then, ironically, I felt very lonely.
Orkut sounds even worse. It sounds very limited, elitist and what? No way out? Freaky. And the homepage asking, "Who do you know?" is shallow and pathetic. I find myself doubting the people that I DO know when they invite me to join Orkut.

my passward and secreat is changed by some one please help me

invitation only obviously makes everybody crazy to be invited.

Ochre,

I don't know why you can't think of anything more arbitrary; the internet is about connecting people, and in its rudimentary phases, plotting connections and degress of separation is fairly sensible for a system designed to build on those connections. That said, I don't have much use for online social networks (I have a friendster account, but I only bother with it when another person I know appears on the network. Other than that I have no real use for it). My interest was rather in seeing what this little Google venture amounts to, seeing as it has recieved its fair share of negative response from people here. There's no "grasping-for-meaning-in-other-people fraudulence" at work here. Anyway, comments here have convinced me to avoid registering even if invited for as long as this service remains in this ambiguous testing phase and shows itself to be either an uncharacteristically underhanded marketing tool or a useful network of some kind.

"So stop telling me to shut up and stop using the thing. If you don't want to hear my rants, don't read em."

One could also say if you don't like the idea of orkut - don't use it. Simple, isn't it?

Also orkut is not a public service provided by the government but is instead PRIVATELY OWNED and thus doesn't need to apply the principles of democracy and doesn't need to be available to everyone.

"So stop telling me to shut up and stop using the thing. If you don't want to hear my rants, don't read em."

One could also say if you don't like the idea of orkut - don't use it. Simple, isn't it?

Also orkut is not a public service provided by the government but is instead PRIVATELY OWNED and thus doesn't need to apply the principles of democracy and doesn't need to be available to everyone.

I havent been invited to Orkut so I really can't give any insight to why some of the problems are there. What I can give is the fact that this is new...ALPHA if what I read was correct.

There are a lot of growing pains with new applications/software that people are asked what they think of the software in itself.
What do you not like about it?
What do you like about it?
What changes do you think might help the community?
If you have a bitch about the way something works.....instead of just bitching about it, come up with possible solutions! At least give ideas to help make it better. Bitching by itself does not do anything to help unless you are looking to raise blood pressure.

Now, with that said, Is anyone able to send me an invitation? Or tell me how to go about getting an invitation?

Thanks!

Oh, boo hoo - they offer a network where people feel special and gain contacts for the price of information on our interests.
Oh no! Maybe they can improve their services even more! Big deal, we'll probably profit from it in the long run anyway.

And if you say "I don't want them to sell my valuable information on without getting paid!"... that's just lame. First of all, you get 'paid' by being able to network on Orkut. The more you network and gain contacts, the better for you (because you think it's fun) and for Google (they might gather information). It's a mutual thing.

Try to find a decent, 'real' job where they pay you for telling them what you have in your room.

Get real, it's not terrible that people feel special whilst other benefit on it.

Oh, boo hoo - they offer a network where people feel special and gain contacts for the price of information on our interests.
Oh no! Maybe they can improve their services even more! Big deal, we'll probably profit from it in the long run anyway.

And if you say "I don't want them to sell my valuable information on without getting paid!"... that's just lame. First of all, you get 'paid' by being able to network on Orkut. The more you network and gain contacts, the better for you (because you think it's fun) and for Google (they might gather information). It's a mutual thing.

Try to find a decent, 'real' job where they pay you for telling them what you have in your room.

Get real, it's not terrible that people feel special whilst other benefit on it.

Could someone invite me into the Orkut community so i can see if it really is as horrible as some people say.

Could someone invite me into the Orkut community so i can see if it really is as horrible as some people say.

Hello, I'd like to be invited too... can someone help me? Tks!

Hello, I want to know something about that software that make links around the world and make friendishp. I have many friends in the internet but noone told me about it yet. Sincerely Ana