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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?"
To get invited, just go to a Dave Matthews concert...duh!
A programmer is a machine for converting coffee into code.
I miss the old exclusive LiveJournal. Perhaps this can assuage my lost status?
Friendster was hard to get into because of all those JSP errors. Orkut is by invitation only. Slight difference.
Subscribe for free to my show!
I thought those went out of fashion years ago...
So those of us who no one likes will never be let to join? And I thought my life was bad now! First I'm kept out of all of the real world social places... not the online ones too? Could it get any worse?
Yes, the above is sarcasm!
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
Named after one of its engineers, Orkut Buyukkokten
:(
They should have named it Buyukkokten!
Never argue with an idiot, he'll just lower you to his level and beat you with experience.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Alright! Now thru the golden graces of Google, they've amassed all the collective might of the PhD's they employ to re-create the negative social effects of high school cliques and elitism!
YAY!
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
Orkut? They'll have to do quite a bit of work to give their members the prestige that's associated with having a Slashdot fan.
An invitation-only society will always become cannabalistic and/or inbred.
I don't want to be invited into that!
Don't believe anything I say. I crash test crack pipes for a living.
It'd be interesting to see how the contacts branch from the original 12,000 people.
You could see how they branch, what countries they cross into, and how people relate to each other (interests, age, etc.)
I wonder if this'd be something sociologists would like to watch...?
google continue their world domination attempts, next thing you know we'll have google linux, google word pro, and google tunes (gTunes?) ... they'll release it all in a single package and call it googogogol
Take away the right to say "fuck" and you take away the right to say "fuck the government." - Lenny Bruce
...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.
Sounds like living in the Hamptons.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
Cause if it is, I don't see how it will. Friendster makes it far easier for people to join - and create their own social networks with their friends, because you don't need an invitation to join in the first place. That allows them to create a much larger userbase - even if it means isolated communities within the larger group.
This on the other hand seems to want to create one large community, but it's based on the 12,000 people that got emails in the first place, which makes it much more restrictive and makes it much harder for new users to join and thus expand the userbase.
Why, exactly, is this on Slashdot?
===========
Together, we will drive the rats from the tundra.
slashdotters don't know 3 people each if you discount both parents and Mittens the cat.
Trolling is a art,
Good question. all my friends were on it so i joined, and it's so frusturating. During the day it will take 20 to 30 seconds to login and load up a page, and it really isn't that cool...
I wouldn't join any club that would have me as a member. =)
Frankly, I think they can go screw themselves....I won't hunt down a way to get into "the clique" and may not even if a friend invites me.
but it still won't keep out the riff-raff
MOD PARENT DOWN!! IMPERSONATION!
Look closely at his name! RAY_R_NOND? looks like raymond but spelled rayrnond. See it?
See the FAQ
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.
It seems to me, that once you've been invited, you can "invite" your web-driven robot, which can offer a backdoor for many other random people you don't know.
It's like saying you can't get into a brick-and-mortar "gated community." Unless you're a pizza delivery guy. Or any of his friends.
[
1) Wow, it's even more cliquey than C2! Well, almost.
2) The Orkut website is really pretty.
This is typical for Google. How do they get the text to fade in on page load? It's really neat. Look at the TOS page for an example - you see the pink/purple orkut.com's for a while, and then the rest of the text fades in. Is this just a simple CSS thing I should know but don't because I'm stupid?
3) Check out the "golden key" icon (at their privacy policy). It's amazing! lol
We recently had heard in the office over one of the Yellow Machine that's made by Anthology Solutions.
They (friendster) really could _really_ use the horse power google has. It can be _very slow_ sometimes and I constanly get messages that my network cannot be traced from me to someone in my network. Hmmmm. I really like Friendster but Orkut may have the backend power to make social networking a more friendly experience.
Mecworks BLOG
Does the fact that I don't need this service mean I have a life?
FLR
... but while "invitation only" to begin with, doesn't necessarily ensure the quality of the network in the future. All of us have some "good" friends, as well as "bad" friends. The people with more questionable ethics could even go as far as auctioning an invitiation on ebay or something similar.
All forms of socialization over the internet seem to start out with loads of potential, but in the end, they all suffer from the scum that tends to surface.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
Don't you think it's a bit stupid that they have 2 buttons on the home page that say "Join Orkut" that redirect people to a page that say they can't really join...
But at least in Advogato, you can see a list of existing members in order to contact them through external channels to get certified, unlike in what I saw during 30 seconds of browsing orkut.com.
It seems to me that Google could very well be sitting on a large pool of cash that might make it worth some corporate raiders' time to finance a huge takeover and pay for it out of that pool of money. If Google purposely diversifies their operation to initiatives that might not ever turn a profit, they can reduce that pool prior to IPO. Might not be the brightest choice right out of the box, but given that their price is sure to reduce over two-three quarters post-IPO, it'll reduce their attractiveness to a takeover attempt.
Of course, being private at this time, none of this has any basis in fact. Although, the fact that Google's probably going to spend $25mil on this suggests that they really do have stupid piles of cash, and can afford to potentially toss big chunks of it away on potential failures.
...where the word "orkut" is the colloquial plural of "orgasm".
The potential is huge. Eventually both Finns currently reading slashdot will join, and will be largely disappointed.
-bpfh
-BPFH
about these things. I met my best friend, my wife and my rabbi on friendster. I'm not even jewish!
;-) Sorry.
Quack, quack.
Once invited, do I get a cool little apron, learn the secret handshake (thumb on index finger's knuckle), and the pass-words?
If not, I think I'll skip it...
It's probably by invitation only because it's still in beta. If you look at their homepage, next to the purpleish Orkut logo at the upper-right, it says "beta" in white letters.
You probably shouldn't click this.
If I actually had any friends, I wouldn't need a "social networking service".
I wonder if they will complain about diseases in chat rooms regarding orkut??
I mailed them and said I had no friends and will they please let me in. join me.
Take away the right to say "fuck" and you take away the right to say "fuck the government." - Lenny Bruce
It's free
Friendster has such momentum even though it is so buggy and slow. Can anyone explain why it is so popular?
:)
Because it has a clean, simple and intuitive user interface. It is very well designed, except for the database part
All the other social networking sites are a PITA to navigate, and have really cluttered, obnoxious UIs.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
This doesn't seem as big news as it could be. It's not a major project of Google, but something one of the engineers built during company time when instructed to work on a personal project. It's not branded "Google Friends" afterall.
Just kidding! :-P
Next time someone questions the educational ability of the internet, simply respond with that one word. It is proof that we've all learned something new, which we probably never would have.
So far, there's nothing on eBay. There's bound to be a sycophant out there willing to pay to join this thing.
sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it.
In finnish, the word "orkut" is the plural form of the slang word for orgasm. Gives a completely new meaning for the idea of "Orkut is an online community that connects people through a network of trusted friends."
"There is a terrorist behind every bush"
I wouldn't want to be member of any network that would have me, anyway.
---anactofgod---
---anactofgod---
"Equal opportunity swindling - *that* is the true test of a sustainable democracy."
You seem to be looking for
http://www.booble.com/
I'm sure Google owns googleporn.com just so no one else would buy it and use it, not because they have any attention of using it themselves.
Orkut.com will have a delayed /. effect. Why? 'Coz not a lot of people will try to join/access it from within their workplace (Site is blocked as in my case, not a good thing to do at workplace and all the other reasons).
Free XBox, PS2
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?
Google put up a network to compete w/ Friendster.
Riiiiight
Twelve thousand initial invitations went out to join.
Riiiight
Only members can invite new members.
Riiiight
This is the BEST vaporware campaign EVER!
---anactofgod---
---anactofgod---
"Equal opportunity swindling - *that* is the true test of a sustainable democracy."
I feel like the fat kid who always got picked last for dodgeball. Wait, I am the fat kid that always got picked last for dodgeball. Somehow this hurts slightly more.
-=-=-=-=-=--=-=-=-=-=-=-
What would Yossarian do?
Who controls the British crown?
Who keeps the metric system down?
We do! We do!
Who leaves Atlantis off the maps?
Who keeps the martians under wraps?
We do! We do!
Who holds back the electric car?
Who makes Steve Guttenberg a star?
We do! We do!
Who robs the cave fish of their sight?
Who rigs every Oscars night?
We do! We do!
Yeah. I really want to be part of Orkut. Please, someone invite me. Not.
The answer lies in its alternate name, which they should have just gone ahead and used: "Fuckster". Like hotornot, it's where you go to get laid if you don't have sufficient social skills to do so through face to face interaction.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The first rule of Orkut club is you don't talk about Orkut club.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
Just be absolutely sure that none of your invitees are members of the RIAA/MPAA/etc.
An invitation-only society will always become cannabalistic and/or inbred.
Inbreeding beats the hell out of no breeding...
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.
The use of irony in this context conforms to 2:1. You wouldn't expect MSN to start advertising for Mandrake, would you?
Lalala
Mobster: you must be a member of a gang or Mafia. To get in, you need to have a rap sheet with at least 20 entries. First 12,000 invites went to email addresses in Federal prisons.
Witchster: you must be an initiate into witchcraft. To get in you need to have posted at least one spell of your own creation, with details on the underlying operation principles. First 12,000 invites went to the High Priest/Priestesses of covens registered as nonprofits.
Govster: you must be a politician who is, or recently was, running for any public office in the United States of America. To get in you must have a public web site that contains the slogan "Vote for America! Vote for me!". First 12,000 invites went to the list of people who ran for Governor of California in the latest state election.
=^..^= all your rodent are belong to us
I'm not invited!? Well, I just start my own social network and it'll be REALLY cool and it'll be better than yours! And you can't join. So there!
OH Goody- holographic meatloaf again.
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
Course when you realize that 11,900 of the invitations were filtered as spam or junkmail and the only about 1 percent of the people who received will actually join........hope you are friends with Steve Goobie ;-)
The second I saw the annoying fade-in text effect. Google is nice because it's simple. No animations, no JS, and no fade-in text. This site doesn't seem to be much in the spirit of Google, no matter who runs it.
So I send an email to the feedback and help address. The feedback autoresponse basically says we might read your email but we won't respond. Still waiting for an answer from help. I will post here when I get it.
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
I cant wait to see the insane auctions for "an invitation". "Trust" in the community will be going to the highest bidder...
Won't invite me, will they? Well, screw them. I'll just start my own club. And I'll invite nobody. HAHAHAHAHAHAHA
-- Thou hast strayed far from the path of the Avatar.
So, I'm running a site for free - Indecent Blogging and I'd love it to get to the size of Friendster. It's completely free and even ad free for now, but it seems to have hit a wall, so that doesn't really explain it. IB is about sex...and sex sells - so, what am I missing?
I've noticed a few things that need to be added - a better profile page, a way for users to communicate (email?) - I want to grow the community. Any suggestions? (your site sucks now withstanding)
Like sex? Read and write about it! Indecent Blogging
That said, that doesn't mean that unexpected uses of these services won't develop. I just don't see it as a dating tool (which seems to be the slant on this).
Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes. -- Walt Whitman
Google has in recent months taken up a strategy of buying up every website with "google" in their domain name in a brand-image protection spree. They recently got computer parts storeGoogleGear.com to change its name to ZipZoomFly.com... which was a very interesting case because Google had no legal leg to stand on... the computer gear store had named its mascot a "Google" before the search engine existed, the sites looked completely different, and the computer gear store didn't do web searching and the web searching company didn't sell computer gear.
The deal was apparently struck quietly, but clearly some cash was paid. There never was any media coverage of the event, and I'm pretty sure the terms of the deal reqires the computer gear store to not disclose how much they got.
is a group I want to join!!! :-)
The bitter lessons of a veteran coder: http://bitterprogrammer.blogspot.com
It's the Eric Cartman business model... we've built this really great thing and YOU CAN'T USE IT!
People will be clamoring to try and get access to this thing only because they're being told they can't have it.
What a great country!
You are in error. No-one is screaming. Thank you for your cooperation.
Orkut helped make it, it was named after him, and now he is a member (presumably). Kinda smacks of recursion, or incest.
Oh, and someone invite me.
2Lame2BeInvitedByGoogle.20.odd1@spamgourmet.com
Thanks kids
I've found tribe.net to be a smoother alternative to Friendster. Hell they even have a "tribe" devoted to friendster-hating! Oh, and they also do ads by google.
harmonious design
People tend to form groups with those who are like them in some way. If they sent random invitations and these receivers invite their friends to join, we might have a very interesting simulation. For example, we can surmise that everyone who joins is computer literate. Other than that, it's all up in the air. Therefore, as people invite other who are probably like themselves (friends tend to be that way), we may end up with a very large and fairly good sample of Netizens. This, in turn, would be very useful for market research which, as we all know, can fetch a pretty hefty price on the open market. Therefore: no fees to join, no fees to maintain membership...just fill out a survey for us every once in a while. We don't even really need your e-mail address...just fill out the survey. Call me strange but I think I could have been sitting on a pile of money if I would have implemented this first. I mean, people always want to join what you don't want them to join.
"We are accountable for not only what we do, but also that which we don't do." -- Moliere
The terms and conditions (aka, terms of service) state that you can quit orkut at any time, for any reason just by emailing admin@orkut.com.
Show 'em who's boss: Quit before you're invited!
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
This reminds me of the South Park episode where Cartman buys a failed amusement park and doesn't let anyone else in.
Soon everyone wants in, mostly because Cartman keeps telling everyone they can't get in.
He slowly has to let people in to get money to maintain it. Once all the people get in Cartman hates the place and sells it.
what you might be missing is a way to search for people based on zipcode, and a way to message people internally. friendster is like match.com, except free. that's why it's so popular.
Friendster was cool for about a month, then it was realized their webservers are now 10 times slower than Slashdot.
Myspace, being almost the same as friendster sudenly became popular, while their downtime was significantly less than Friendster's.
My question is once you setup your cliques of friends, then what? Their journaling feature seems to be widely unused, and, uh, all the attractive women on there are "in a relationship"
How much longer will it be before orkut invites go up on ebay?
I am too lame to make a
That's a good idea. I was already thinking of a dating service or more appropriatly something similar to Adult Friend Finder.
Like sex? Read and write about it! Indecent Blogging
I'm surprised that Google doesn't create more plays on its own name for various functions. Besides the Froogle shopping site that could have:
Whoogle -- social networks
Oogle -- porn
Doogle -- jobs
Zoogle -- info on animals
Choogle -- food, recipes, and restaurants
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Orkut Buyukkokten has done this before.
As long as we're making arbitrary demands...
The enemies of Democracy are
Seems like a lot of addresses. How were they gathered?
Doesn't look like orkut.com had a sign-up period or anything...
Doesn't look like it was sent to Google-Friends Newsletter (not in the archive; plus RTFA, in which says "Google spokeswoman Eileen Rodriquez said that despite Orkut's affiliation, the service is not part of Google's product portfolio at this time.")
if you charge for it, it's doa. other pay services have taken off, there isn't room for any more. friendster is a bait and switch. they plan on charging for the service in the future.
If I don't get an invitation, does this disprove the Six Degrees theory or just prove that I need to get out more?
I think you are confusing balding 40-year old men who pretend to be teenage girls online with actual women.
Or maybe I'm confusing AOL chat rooms with friendster.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
do we need a Ph.D to get in? :P
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...
They already have their "safe search" for images. Maybe they could just reverse that...
I have a life. I really do. I've just chosen to ignore it.
Fcuk all that - join Hatester. You know that is why you join - so you can flame - so why not just admit it? Hatester is inevitable. Hatester is the future!
Okay, now THAT was funny!
"This isn't a study in computer science, its a study in human behavior"
It can be _very slow_ sometimes...
I can't even log in to Friendster, let alone get to a point where I can get a warning that my network can't be accessed, etc.. I just tried again yesterday, and got the usual 60 second browser timeout after hitting the "login" button.
I totally agree that it's too bad for Friendster, because they sure as shit could have used a boost in performance.
Everybody here seems to assume that any Orkut member has the ability to create other Orkut members (by invitation), but neither the CNN story nor the Orkut website itself supports that assumption.
Many here have issued blanket condemnations of this scheme, based on the idea that a few members could ruin the system by inviting undesirables into the elite club.
If somebody here knows authoritatively what system Orkut is using, would they please speak up?
On the other hand, what system WOULD work the best?
The Web is like Usenet, but
the elephants are untrained.
Nah, Friendster has real chicks on it. That's the whole value of the friend-of-a-friend concept - you can be pretty sure that unless your friends are some real sick fucks, the 20 year old women they vouch for aren't actually balding 40 year old men.
I'm a user of the meetup.com service, and I'm fairly happy with it. Find an interest, go to your local area's page for said interest, sign up, vote on a place to get together; and once a month, you have the opportunity to have coffee (or whatever) with like-minded folks.
It's pretty simple, but the key factor is that there's an expectation that you'll be meeting people in a group, and in a fairly public place. Safety issues are thusly taken into consideration, and you get to meet people whom you might otherwise never run into.
Friendster, and all of the others, provide a service: facilitating introductions between people who might not be the most socially graceful. The cliche of the pasty-faced computer geek who has every IM service known to man, and several dozen contacts on each, but can't make eye contact with someone of the opposite gender to save their life, has become a cliche because there's at least a grain of truth to it. Online introduction services take some of the anxiety out of the process. However, as you might expect, people who are socially awkward don't always take safety concerns into consideration, which is why I would prefer to see more emphasis on group activities.
Now, having said that, I have people who I consider to be good friends on my ICQ contact list, who I have never met (much as I might like to.) But, for every person who makes the grade, there are at least 50 who I would have been perfectly happy had they never stumbled across my profile. At least the "ignore" button takes care of them.
Doing my level best to piss off the religious right wing...
* Hopefully he was on God's buddy list.
* Did he get the Heavenster invite?
* Was he 6 degrees from StPeter@PearlyGates.com?
* Was he listed in the master directory?
* He's taken the big ping-pong ball drop in the sky!
* He's put on the red sweater of eternity!
* His next gig will be at WGod and paid in part by the corporation for public broadcasting!
* He got his bowl-cut for the last time!
Oh what am I talking about?
"This isn't a study in computer science, its a study in human behavior"
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 don't see the need for invitation-only sites
What is the benefit of this?
I'm going to start a "I Hate Orkut" tribe at tribe.net
Six Degrees did this stuff years ago and went belly up. What's the big deal?
Never thought I'd say this on Slashdot, but it's "loose" not "lose"!
I do not have a signature
If I can't get in I'll start my own friends network, but with gambling and hookers!!!
When punk rock is outlawed, only outlaws will have punk rock.
The are only selling 1/3 of the interest in the company... a hostile takeover is not possible !
See Also (Jan 6): "About a third of Mountain View, Calif.-based Google may be sold in the IPO, giving the company a market value of about $12 billion, the bankers said. The company will probably register the shares for sale with the Securities and Exchange Commission this month and sell them by April, the bankers said. "
"Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech."--Benjamin Franklin
You're confusing AOL cat rooms with Friendster. It's a common mistake.
Mind you, I wouldn't want to venture too far from my existing list of friends if I was cruising Friendster for some action. Two or Three degrees away and you can be pretty sure of the accuracy of the person's profile. Finding someone randomly on the other hand...
I don't use it for that purpose myself, as I'm happily engaged, but I am acquaintances with some very, ehrm, active and proud of it women on the site.
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
There is no "bitch" in the middle. It's just a circle of men, each of them reaching into the lap of the guy to their right, stoking his neighbor's meat.
Try to learn the terminology before attempting to use it in a sentence.
since when can you get laid on hotornot?
AFAICT, the best way to get laid is to hang out on everything2.com
There is tonz more info at http://help.orkut.com/ Here are some links from when you are logged in. They redirect to the home page if your not. http://www.orkut.com/Friends.aspx http://www.orkut.com/Communities.aspx http://www.orkut.com/Search.aspx http://help.orkut.com/ http://www.orkut.com/Logout.aspx
Bryan
CT
1: Open ICQ.
2: Either use Random Chat, put some fun criteria into Find User or add 251696825 (me).
Let the good times roll.
Quite why we need all of this bullshit about having to be asked to join is lost in the mists of time.
I'm amazing. You aren't. SUCK IT
I want to join, please invite me.
My name is
Dusty
My email is:
dustylloyd@cox.net
- Kill Yourself, spare us all! -
OTOH it is even more exclusive than Orkut: although you can open an account, there is _no_ inbuilt invitation system for establishing friend links, nor any 'search' function to find other users etc...
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 dunno, "Buyukkokten" sounds too much like "buy you out then" if I phonetically word it out and assume a few mispellings. Is Piping Design Central still #1 at Google? I shudder to think if I've innocently offended the Google overlords with this post.
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.
So on the one hand, they don't collect email addresses. On the other hand, they do. So, which is it?
Okay everyone, shameless plug time.
I am currently creating a PHP version of friendster which I call Slashster. (Yes, this is inspired from Slashdot and Friendster).
I figured that a PHP/mysql implementation would be interesting, and I'm rather curious to see how this thing can end up scaling, and if it can do it well.
I was thinking of launching this on Monday, but this slashdot story was too relevant for me to wait on it, and get some of the press on it.
Right now, its layout is nearly identical to friendster, but will change once I actually get someone with design skill to help me redo it.
There are a couple primary differences between slashster and friendster so far:
I'm very interested in getting input on the place. I'm still doing bugfixes on the site, as I said before, so people visiting might get the occasional parse error or two while I'm updating things.
Still, I'm looking forward to any feedback (positive and negative) on this place. I'm really hoping this post gets modded up, simply so that more people will check it out.
You can email me at the address listed with this user account. Thanks everyone.
--Mark
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
Looks like Orkut has been thinking about this for a while. Here's a paper he published with two HP Labs folks on the subject. Funny excerpt: "They (english majors) were also twice as likely to describe themselves as sexy (18 percent), while on the other hand, only 3 of the 136 Electrical Engineering majors chose to describe themselves in that way."
and the point of the join button is...to take you to a "no, you cant join actually.." page weird
So I'm not against "invitation only" but I think the website somehow defeats the purpose (or the purpose escapes me).
BTW I made a telling typo. Surfed to www.orkus.com, "Orkus" being the old Roman land of the dead (German spelling).
Can someone invite me to the party?
I think the mailman lost my invitation.
Orkut doesn't really appear to be run by Google. Apart from the un-Googlesque design, and lack of interlinkage between the two sites, Orkut appears to be hosted (run a traceroute) by downloadtech.net , whereas google is self-hosted.
Also, the domain is registered to Orkut Buyukkokten, rather than Google Inc. (where both Google and its spinoff sites (froogle) are registereD), with an administrative e-mail contact at Stanford, and a mailing address in an apartment complex in Mountain View.
active and proud of it women
Can I ask a dumb question? Why are they proud of it? What makes doing a bunch of guys at 3 degrees any different than just doing a bunch of random guys?
What is the rationale here? "If I bang 12 guys at 3 degrees I am proud, but if I bang 12 guys at 5 degrees I'd be a slut!"
I'm not a bible thumper or anything, but let's be honest here. This tool is only helping them increase the quality/quantity of their slutty encounters.
I'm a 2000 man.
Ahh, google. The one place we cant slashdot
Im dreaming ofa big bndwdth, That can resist the
A very interesting concept, is it just me or is it kinda six degrees of serparation like? I'm now trying to find out who I know whose a member, somehow I don't think my peers are :D
So, who wants to start up a Tau-Delta-Kai to go up against the Omegas.... sorry, the Orkuts ;-) :D :D
The whole reason Friendster/Orkut is invite-only is because if somebody else invited you into the system, then you must, at some level, be socially acceptable.
Girls don't want to go out with anybody. Moreover, they need a way to justify to themselves and to their friends later on WHY they went out with you/did things with you.
Since you met over the system, then it's "ok" to feel attracted because other girls are feeling attracted too.
Anyone else surprised that it's .net?
who don't have your interests at heart.
please just go and submit all your personal information directly to Upromise.com to expedite your complete enslavement to your corporate masters.
nothing is free.
if the above statement rings true for you then the next obvious question to ask of a "free" service being offered to you by a bottom-line for-profit corporation is, "how does the corporation profit?"
i'm annoyed at how quickly my fellow geeks are rushing our society headlong into a dystopian fantasy novel.
skip Friendster, Orkut, Upromise, and other data profiling entities and go sign-up for an Anonymizer account (yes, i know they are not perfect). do something to further the vision you have for the type of society you want to live in.
hoping to not meet you all in more repressive and restrictive society a few years down the road. please choose something different.
peace
I agree that good system architects don't start with fonts, but otherwise I halfheartedly disagree. Code designed from one reference point is difficult to use from another, in my experience.
It's possible to have both good UI design AND good back-end design, and have them work together. It usually requires several people working together synergistically. And calling them "UI weenies" isn't going to make systems software any better.
Back to the topic, I do concur that for people to *ever* pay for Friendster, whatever the back end is needs to work WAY better.
What makes doing a bunch of guys at 3 degrees any different than just doing a bunch of random guys?
I didn't express what I meant as clearly as I would have liked.
They're proud of being VERY sexually active.
Friendster is just one venue for meeting guys.
The benefit is that they know guys they meet through other friends are less likely to be psychos who'll tie them up and leave them in the basement for three days, beat them or otherwise do things they do not want done.
Guys their friends have already done are an extra bonus.
That, and these communities tend to be rather closed, in that once inside, there's a lot of action, but people outside it have to get blood tests to get in. (No pun intended)
It's not something to be more proud of, it's just safer than picking up people in bars.
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
email me and i'll send you an invite.
shelley{at}shelleymonster{dot}com
got biv?
==============
Together, we will drive the rats from the tundra.
...of smaller social experiment done at Standford with a network called Club Nexus. Orkut was an architect of that experiment. Now he operates on the grand scale of the entire internet. Orkut.com will be able to read clustering, small world effect, and weak tie strength in the global internet society.
c /
http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue8_6/adami
Computer Science is all about trying to find the right wrench to bang in the right screw. -T.Cumbo?
Mittens is already in there. Toonces the wardriving cat gets early access to all these things.
"Be Happy or Die." -- AoN
The surface appearance to the common person would be that www.googlegear.com is directly related to www.google.com because Google has become a well-known name among even the non-tech savvy. Google knows this and probably paid a small amount of money now instead of paying lawyers a proportionally large sum of money later when www.googlegear.com decided to not 'just sell computer parts'.
Yea, I got the invitation to join and joined, it's interesting. It's an interesting idea and they have forums and chats now, and some simple games such as chess and backgammon. Hopefully it get bigger.
Hopefully it remains uninfected for a while.
Additional information at WashingtonPost.com - Captain Kangaroo.
If it responds with "invalid e-mail address", then you struck out; if not, score!
Now, next thing to do is to automate this with your mailbox, and then see which of your "friends" didn't invite you!
Here's a picture of Orkut. I understand why everyone's clammering to be his friend:
http://www.stanford.edu/~orkut/bwphotos/p105.jpg
Dude you do realize your friendster profile is being slashdotted right now?
Well well, and I thought google is all for linux. It seems their orkut site is running on a Windows ASP.NET platform. That can be checked easily with http://www.orkut.com/inc which is an invalid page but shows you their menu structure.
.. to "how to join orkut". ;-)
I agree the wording now is a little to equal to the vocabulary of these shady figures standing in front of questionable etablissements everybody surely heard friends of one's friends friends talk about
Code is Speech. No to Censorship.
If dating is your main intention I'd recommend you use hotornot. It's cheaper then match.com and has so far worked for me. Match.com has never worked for me.
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.
..but the irony would be unbearable. Oh well..
Very well put, nevertheless, I'll be reading more from you.
668.5
I would never join any club that would have me as a member -- to paraphrase Groucho.
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
Orkut.
That's the plural. You are assuming the Finns are a promiscuous people, you insensitive clod!
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
A similar concept has already been done for the corporate pigopolists at They Rule - Flash required, but it's worth it.
My prediction - that ALL of the branches of the social Orkut network bend back on themselves to focus on a single individual being that is the source and underpinning of all human thought , culture and society on this planet - Kevin Bacon
It's like that one Mission Hill where they start a club that doesn't exist and let nobody in and it becomes insanely popular.
Doing a google search for orkut invitationreturns 19 results. We all suck...
I wonder how many of those invitations went outside the US. Probably few or none.
Anyway... mod me up! I want to get invited!!!! :-)
Buddyzoo already does something like this. You upload your AIM buddy list and it draws connections between people by seeing who has who on their list. It rates your popularity based on how many people have you on their list and makes note of cliques (when a group of people all have each other on their list). It even generates a nice SVG diagram to show how the people on your list are linked with each other.
I'll trade a friendster invite for a Okrut invite. Any takers??
"The world only exists in your eyes. You can make it as big or as small as you want." - F Scott Fitzgerald
slashdotters don't know 3 people each if you discount both parents and Mittens the cat. :(
Excuse me, I have two cats, and their names are not Mittens.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
It's interesting... assume you're trying to colonize a planet... or pick a sperm donor for your baby. Do you want to pick 12,000 computer geeks? 12,000 socialites? 12,000 loose slutty women? 12,000 smart people? 12,000 funny people? 12,000 people with "a great personality" (aka: ugly)? A mixture of both/all? Will the intermingle? Will their procreations become boringly average people?
6degrees or whatever it was called was fascinating to me. Not so much for the seperation angle or the giant cloud, but rather for the cliques that showed up and/or developed.
I wonder how Googles newly populated universe will end up. And I wonder how cool it would be to have a UID
--D
Free stool... last chance.
-
Inventor of the term 'pardon my French'.
If Google's invite list looks like the photos on the webpage, they may be asking for a discrimination lawsuit. (Everyone's young and white). Their imminent IPO raises the question can a public company run a social network whose admittance policy discriminates based on who you know? I think they can probably get away with only offering the service to citizens of the US or EU, but can they get away with offering a service that is only available to the cool friends of the chosen 1200 and their cool friends? Professional clubs in most US states and cities aren't allowed to discriminate by race or sex; will this be treated any differently?
Personally, I dislike laws that enforce who you can associate with, but given that they exist, it seems like this service may easily run afoul of them.
Google is definitely a group of nice folks. They are one of the few entities (perhaps *the* only who could actually get away with it) that could simply get GoogleGear to change their name by just eliminating any references to "googlegear" from their database. Instead, they went for a peaceful solution.
May we never see th
Now even the nerds won't let me into their circle of friends.. although, I'm sure there is hope. Someone will start selling invitations on Amazon, and I'll just have to buy my friends again.
A friend invited me into Friendster and I got on to see what it was like, but being that restrictive, there was no one to link to or find anything about, and all the friends I already have, I talk to with email or voice just fine and Friendster really offers nothing to even give me a reason to invite them, so what's the point? Something like that is for finding *new* friends, so I haven't been back. Don't see any reason to even be interested in Google's version...
I'd guess the reason it's invite only is to keep things manageable. If you had a community in beta, would you want it slashdotted with new users (many of whom would bitch and moan about every glitch) while you were still trying to smooth out the rough edges?
I'm sure that once Google feels this is ready for unfettered public consumption, the invitation only rule will die.
Greg
Start a happiness pandemic
i got an invite. pfffft! ;-)
Mobster: you must be a member of a gang or Mafia. To get in, you need to have a rap sheet with at least 20 entries. First 12,000 invites went to email addresses in Federal prisons.
Officially, no on else can join. Unofficially, you just need to make us an offer we can't refuse.
Witchster: you must be an initiate into witchcraft. To get in you need to have posted at least one spell of your own creation, with details on the underlying operation principles. First 12,000 invites went to the High Priest/Priestesses of covens registered as nonprofits.
The master list is kept sealed in vault and never updated. It is, hower, checked periodically. If your name magically shows up on the list, you're in.
1. Set up invitation-only clique service
2. Give invitations to google execs
3. Give away a few to celebrities
4. Google execs sell the rest to the masses of wannabe-popular nerds
5. Profit!!!
Denn wir sind wie Baumstaemme im Schnee. Scheinbar liegen sei glatt auf, mit kleinem anstoss sollte man sie wegschieben
Aren't we Linux users pretty-much immune to the internet-sex STD's?
...suddenly all those "friend & foe" options will become a whole lot more important.
Oh, Oh, Pick me, Pick me, I'm your slash dot friend, don't you remember!
So let's see, this great site that noone can even see is the next big wave?
Is this supposed to be a kind of Masonic Lodge for geeks?
Well, um, I can neither confirm nor deny the presence of other places, but what good is a secret club everyone knows about?
Hey, we should be over of this 'i run this service' mania. FOAF project is way more interesting and it's open - everybody can specify their friends. without invitations. viva la open web!
I am on both friendster and e2, so take this with the proper emphasis if you can; e2 is a place to get laid if you have a beautiful mind, and hotornot is the place to get laid if you have a beautiful body. Or at least, a decent one.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
if i ever get invited to join orkut (not likely), i'll invite all of you slashdotters, and everyone else i can convince to join as well.
we'll show em.
LOL Thanks that was classic. I'm going to have to cut and paste this entire thread I've started to my blog to save it for posterity.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
I'm part of another exclusive social-circles site called The Yak which only allows people to join if they know current members. Seems like a number of these have been popping up lately.
http://www.theyak.com
I doubt if Friendster is all that popular, in the sense of having lots of enthusiastic members. Given the quality of their software, popularity would destroy them! But they are good at generating buzz. Which makes them popular where they want to be popular -- in the media and on Wall Street.
http://216.239.53.104/search?q=cache:DvnGUlUZgusJ: www.hpl.hp.com/shl/papers/social/social.pdf+orkut+ invite&hl=en&ie=UTF-8
Orkut Buyukkokten is a Turkish name-surname. Orkut is actually an ancient name probably thousand year ago it was used. Buyukkokten literally means "Coming from big root" or "Has big roots" Please do not make fun of names.
Google just passed 1,000 employees, with around 650 full-timers having stock options. (We had a recent discussion about this when it was announced they were going public.)
So maybe 12,000 includes all Google's employees, their families and closest friends? Or maybe it includes their suppliers and customers?
Free bonus! Buy an ad on Google and get invitied to join Orkut!
(You have my apologies for nitpicking a funny post.)
I spend my life entertaining my brain.
Bottom line: I'm all for cheering for the little guys, and booing the big boys. It's the sanest thing to do.
I prefer Ryze.com. It's basically a social networking site but its got more of a Business Networking angle to it. You're free to sign up, but you have to "make" friends by requesting people to be added to your friends' list, and that doesn't happen till they click "OK". So that way, though its open unlike Orkut, there's still the element of closed clusters or whatever it is that you call them. I just won't add to my list the people I don't trust. Unless of course she's hot.. eh eh..ahem.
www.ryze.com
- Aalaap
The only use I could see for this is for file trading? Do either services let you do this, and if not then what does it do?
Regards,
Steve
One thing that I'm curious and/or concerned about, however, is whether orkut can really be -- as it seemingly intends -- all things to all networkers. In this early version, there seems to be enough goofy/mushy/flirty stuff in it to deter serious business networkers (who'll likely prefer spoke.com), but not enough of the romance/love/sex component to effectively compete with Yafro, Match.com, and Evite.
Currently orkut's (obviously) got the Google cache plus the processor speed that comes along with that. Additionally, the founding members of orkut.com are largely Googlers who -- from my cursory observation and knowledge -- happen to be largely intelligent and interesting people.
I've actually written a more detailed review of my initial orkut experiences, and I'd certainly welcome feedback :)
Only the truly shameless shill their blog in a Slashdot sig
All that money and they used milk carton faces for their splash page?
Actually a better suggestion would be Rod Steiger, but then again, people would have no clue what you were talking about, would they :)
Any technology distinguishable from magic, is insufficiently advanced.
"Error: Cannot access database. java.lang.NullPointerException "
Somebody invite me to Orkut !!!!
Unless you're having sex with parrots.
*coughs* what? you've got explain that that... I dig around e2 when I want to look up something with better-than-encyclopia explanation. How getting laid fits into this makes my head spin. I went to check it out now too, totally puzzled. Still don't get it.
SIG: HUP
As a testament to the power of word-of-mouth advertising, I now have a Friendster account.
I feel kinda skeevy.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
It does not offer any significantly new functionality. What it does offer, is just a different style and look'n'feel. There are lots of different ways for people to communicate with one another, but for mysterious reasons that we'll never understand, some ways "click" with some people, and some don't. You meet different people on Usenet than you do on Slashdot, who are also different than you do on one of these types of services, who are also different than the people on another one of these types of services.
The thing is, the more options you have, the more likely that you'll just happen to like one of them and (here's the important part) use it. And when people use this stuff (whatever their reason is) then it's a good thing, because they get people talking to one another.
Don't worry if it plays off people's egos. That doesn't matter. What matters is that you start talking. As soon as you get one "date" (whether it's actually a romantic interlude with a member of the opposite sex, or whether you meet someone who has a common interest) then it instantly pays off. It'll be someone that, yeah, you could have emailed them, or visited their website, or instant messaged them, or replied to their blog, or whatever --- but you didn't, did you? You didn't meet them until you used this cheezy website. And it did the job.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.