waider

Mostly content-free article about Orkut on News.com. It does mention that there are only three engineers working on the system, but most of the rest seems to be handwaving. I was interested in the comment from the Yahoo! guy; technically, Yahoo! is probably the longest-standing social network of them all, so they should have a lot more useful information to contribute on the topic. As mentioned before, I've hacked up a bunch of notes on what I think is wrong - and possibly unsolveable - with social networking software, but I've yet to actually do anything like write a coherent rant^Warticle on it. Having discussed it with wisn for a bit yesterday, we both agreed that the biggest stumbling block for anyone's rating system is that the ratings are inherently at the mercies of social dynamics, as existing networks like LiveJournal have shown - hands up who hasn't had one of their "de-friended" acquaintances go off in a big hissy fit on being removed from said friendslist? Or who hasn't agonised over how someone will react to not being reciprocally friended? (or who cringes at the arbitrary conjugation of the word "friend"...)

I really should write this up into something. Although I notice Clay Shirky appears to be doing some similar exploration, except he's writing multiple articles on it.

So, ah. Orkut. Right. It's been pretty much as I expected; I've not mysteriously connected with any long-lost people, I've not acquired new and interesting friends; essentially I've pretty much established an identical network to my livejournal friends group which in turn is largely based on links that were forged when talk.bizarre was a slightly more viable venue for discourse (or abuse). And that's the positive stuff. I've had a variety of uninteresting and crappy FOAF messages, including one this morning from some idiot trying to drum up interest in his stupid vanity site. Orkut, where people you don't know can send you spam because someone you know knows them. Great selling point, that. I can't even find a button on the mailbox that says "block all messages from this person" nor one that says, "don't bother sending me FOAF messages"; there may well be one, but it's not in any obvious place and I'm not quite enthralled enough by Orkut to go digging for it. The forums I've looked at are nigh-on useless; most of them have topics that make MetaFilter's front page seem like a hotbed of opinionated discussion, and I discovered this morning that I can't delete a post I made. I can replace all the text, I guess, with the word "deleted" or better still, replace it with "deleted by Orkut staff" and set off a rumourmill of conspiracy theories, but see previous about lack of enthrallment.

Now, someone has said to me that you get out of this sort of thing as much as you put into it, and frankly that's pants. I've gotten less out of this than I've put into it. I don't count FOAF spam as a threefold return. Of course, I'll leave my account there. For now, anyway. Just in case, you know?

Social Networking.

I received an Orkut invite yesterday from someone I didn't recognise but who I've apparently had technical dealings with in the past. Aside from the much-ranted-about privacy issues, and the friend-or-not issue that seems to cause so many allegedly antisocial geeks such heartrending difficulty, my biggest problem with any of the social networking toys I've looked at to date is the question of what the hell it gives me. Maybe I'm unique in not being particularly enamoured with the notion of belonging to a web of people the bulk of whom I don't actually know, but so far I've seen nothing compelling about these systems. LiveJournal provides a way of keeping in touch with people I know from UseNet, without the spam and noise that makes UseNet unusable, so there's an instant win for LiveJournal from my POV. But beyond that, I've already got email and a multi-protocol instant messenger for keeping in touch with people, and I really can't see how filling out yet another demographic form and writing quirky yet insightful things about myself gets me anything over and above what's presented to people who accidentally hit my website while googling for, say, hash brownies or bike tricks (the two most common search referrers on my site) and start looking around.