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Google Social Network: Orkut
shelleymonster writes "According to CNET, Google has quietly released its own version of Friendster, called Orkut. About 3 months ago, Google entered into talks to acquire Friendster, but was turned down. Named after one of its engineers, Orkut Buyukkokten, the new social network looks even tougher to get into than Friendster. An initial 12,000 invitations were sent out, and new users can only join through an existing user. Someone want to invite me?"
Comment removed based on user account deletion
...created Orkut.com in the past several months by working on it about one day a week--an amount that Google asks all of its engineers to devote to personal projects
Ok, that is a cool company. I wish I was working at Google. But they haven't opened a software development office in Iowa yet.
Why, exactly, is this on Slashdot?
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Together, we will drive the rats from the tundra.
yet another way for people to make themselves feel popular and socially accepted while being a commodity for someone else.
get over yourselves and do something useful.
Does the fact that I don't need this service mean I have a life?
FLR
If I actually had any friends, I wouldn't need a "social networking service".
I love the numerous links imploring me to 'Join Orkut', only to bring up a page saying " Membership to orkut is by invitation only." It's like yelling from your doorway to 'come on in', only to ask for a ticket at the door.
Why is anything anything?
A social network's attempts at exclusivity would seem to be at odds with scalability. Once the network exceeds some threshold then it is bound to contain mutually distrusted people connected by chain of trust. The problem is that trust is not fully transitive -- it is not true that if A trusts B and B trusts C, then A trusts C.
A more scalable approach would allow open enrollment and self-organizing clusters. Each joiner would become trusted within one or more loosely defined clusters of BOFs, while remaining untrusted or disliked by other BOFs. At a higher level, BOFs could even assign trust to other BOFs, with members partially inheriting the relative trust levels of the BOF(s) they belong to.
Membership-by-invitation creates an unfortunate hurdle to creating truely globe-spanning networks because it means you have to know someone to be permitted to know someone. Although intended to weed out the riff-raff, invitation-only policies probably do more to create obstacles for legitimate, but previously socially unconnected, potential members. A better post-joining filtration/sortation/cluster would let everyone find their respective community(s).
A truely scalable social network would admit and support gun-toting republicans, and enviro-liberal democrats, and Microsoft apologists, and Apple fanboys. A set of trust distance functions would ensure that each member stays within their respective BOF clusters.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Because most the people on Friendster are polly or sexually lose?
Because once on there are women who troll for "friends of friends" to bang?
Because most those women are computer Geeks who like "Geek pillow talk?"
Because most the female pics are very pretty???
Any of that explain it???
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
The only question I have is, how are you supposed to "meet new people" or "expand your social structure" if all you are doing is inviting all the people you already know. From what I have seen, most people have a fairly static social circle, and there is not much movement between them.
If I could get a firm grip on reality, I'd choke it...
...and then /. will hate him like a holy Jihad, with every other story a lefthanded rant about how Google sucks, and how the world of mindless sheep computer users just don't properly appreciate the open-source alternatives (which are JUST AS GOOD even though they're:
a) not as stable
b) hell to install)
Can I be modded +1, Prophetic?
-Styopa
Take a look at their TOS before posting anything of any importance to you.
orkut.com's proprietary rights
By submitting, posting or displaying any Materials on or through the orkut.com service, you automatically grant to us a worldwide, non-exclusive, sublicenseable, transferable, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable right to copy, distribute, create derivative works of, publicly perform and display such Materials
Emphasis added by me.
I think there is only a finite number of people interested in social networking sites like Orkut, Friendster, Tribe, etc.
Given the proven theory of 6 degrees of separation, it shouldnt take very long for all possible connections to be made before the growth reaches a plateau.
Eventually, everyone on each social network will want to have the most connections and will also get an account at all the other social networks.
I've seen this happen in online dating websites that offer "free" accounts.
I've browsed all the online websites that have a sizeable number of people in my city, and 90% of all the women with a free account are the same women across all those sites.
I would go so far as to say that's the whole point. They're probably doing this to analyze statistically how such networking takes place. This would be useful as a model for many things, and I'm sure marketers would be interested if no one else.
Information transfer theory is cool, and no one has the possibility to study it like Google does.
I had to put on my tinfoil hat for this one, but "Orkut" is really, REALLY old news. The funny thing was, all mention of it has been virtually stripped from Google. "Orkut" is the revival of "Club Nexus", something Orkut built while at Stanford University. You can see a more complete description of Orkut/Club Nexus here.
Also, Stanford mentions it here. It's also been live for quite sometime as Stanford's inCircle. The oldest mentions I can find in Google are from 1991, but then again, Google's been pretty well stripped of information on the subject.
The oddest part, of course, is that http://www.clubnexus.com/ is gone, and purged from the Google cache. Same thing is true of http://clubnexus.stanford.edu/. *sigh*
Anyway, here's Club Nexus/Orkut in a nutshell: "Some people were upset because they're not sexy," says Buyokkokten.
Cheers.