Slashdot Mirror
Orkut Goes Dark, At Least For A Bit
caferace writes "As quickly as it went up, Orkut is offline, as least temporarily. Google's experiment in social networking had a huge rise in members over the last few days, and things got chaotic pretty quick, revelaing some scaling issues not well anticipated. It still ran quickly, but like infestations of mice, people were going where they shouldn't, exposing the systems weaknesses. :) Smart to pull the plug and work out some of the kinks. From the notice: 'We've taken orkut.com offline for a few days as we implement some improvements and upgrades suggested by users. Since orkut is in the very early stages of development, it's likely to be up and down quite a bit during the coming months. None of the information you've entered will be deleted, and none of the connections you've made will be lost. And, if all goes well, you should see some significant improvements when we come back online. We'll send an email once everything is ready and running again. Thanks for your feedback and for bearing with us as we work our way up the learning curve. The orkut team'"
Seriously.. The google team has shown more innovation than ANY other .com Iv'e ever seen, and all this without intrusive ads...
I don't understand how this Orkut thing is better in any way than IRC.
So that explains why nobody invited me--the site's down.
McCarthy.comism
google's cache in case you missed it.
help fill in hidden movie endings @ End of the Credits
Well, I'm glad that the people at Orkut are working on their user system. I'm hoping that they end up making their system highly scalable.
Time for another shameless, but fairly relevant plug.
A few days ago, I posted about a new Friendster implementation I'm working on called Slashster. It's a PHP/MySQL implementation of Friendster which I've been working on for the past few weeks. I'm hoping that with some attention, that it will scale to a decent size network of people.
As stated in my first post about Slashster, it has a couple features that Friendster doesn't. It has a messageboard, and it's easier to find friends who are closer to you (1-4 degrees of separation). It also has news feeds (which I'll be adding some more fairly soon) It's also quite a bit faster for the time being, but that's obviously because it's fairly small at the moment. :)
I'm thinking about making it open source after most of the features / bugs have been worked out of it. I'm not sure whether a BSD or GPL license would be better for publishing a work like this. Any input from the slashdot community is always welcome :)
Of course, having a business model for this type of site would be useful too. After all, last I heard Friendster has roughly 50 machines for handling its traffic, and is still buckling under the weight of people going on it. I'm really curious to see if MySQL's replication could help a Friendster / Slashster type site scale well. And I'm hoping there will be a way to pay for it. Breaking even for hosting on a project like this would make me happy.
I've also had suggestions to use DB's from Oracle or IBM. There's also postgres... I'm curious to hear input on that as well.
Everyone is welcome to email me with ideas on how to make Slashster pay for itself with an open source model.
Right now Slashster is hovering around 200 users. Of course with a userbase of that size it's going to be pretty zippy even without any optimization whatsoever. I imagine things will start getting interesting around the 10,000 mark. This is, presuming that the people who come to slashster bring their friends, and there's an actual network there. I'm really hoping for something to come out of this.
I doubt that I'm ready for a slashdotting (well, at least making the front page), but in time, I'm hoping the project will grow into something useful, scalable and great user community. Only time will tell.
The support I've had so far has been pretty positive and I've met some pretty nice people from starting the site. I'm hoping to meet some more great people out of this, too.
Thank you Slashdot!
--Mark
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
Google's experiment in social networking had a huge rise in members over the last few days...
/.?
what do you expect when posting a dating service story on
The IT section color scheme sucks.
Just when the geeks with Orkut accounts thought they'd finally made a friend ... WHAM! Gone! I'd say Google has built the first truly realistic social network.
What is down about it? I don't see that notice and everything looks like its working.
101010b 2Ah 52o
Because girls actually get on it, unlike IRC where guys just pretend to be girls.
Then again... this just proves that not even Google is immune to being slashdotted...
Procrastination sucks.
i'm sure being slahdotted is going to help their problem of having too much traffic...
That would be an improvement. If IRC was invitation only, and people who get kick/banned caused all of their relations to get kick/banned, there would be a vast improvement to the quality.
A programmer is a machine for converting coffee into code.
Where Cartman bought his theme park (losing money at the time) and let nobody in? In no time everyone wanted to come to the theme park, and others followed his idea. Restaurants allowing nobody in, etc. Orkut seems like the latest development in that area to me..
"It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey
From the site, it almost sounds like Orkut is a more personalized version of TalkCity... Or perhaps another weird spin on messaging.
Be excellent to each other. And... PARTY ON, DUDES!
I guess by slashdotting the site, all the regular slashdotters automatically started to look for a way in and directly got to hacking.
Ok, who started get spam messages yet selling invitations????
Even google can't support such a rapidly expending site.
..while it lasted. But seriously, it is rather interesting, but there where niggling problems (mostly UI in my opinion) that needed to be fixed. Kudos to them for addressing them so quickly.
*Fortitudo, aequitas, fidelitas.*
I don't know what bugs other people saw, but I had 13 messages in my orkut box this morning, all of which were about how there was a but that let anybody message everybody :)
I didn't read into it so unfortunately I can't give details.
--------
It's OK to be social, just don't tell anyone about it.
Go fuck yourself, tool.
You have to wonder what male/female ration there is. You can't help but think there are much more men taking the typical geek is expected to be a male
Rus
CPanel + Root from $35/mo - 10% off with discount code SLASHDOT
On the intraweb? Chaos?
Say it ain't so.
"..people were going where they shouldn't, exposing the systems weaknesses.."
No, again I say! No!
sig not found
Article from "The Register"
Best part:
Google has attempted to play down the relationship with Orkut, although each page is branded "in affiliation with Google." The Privacy Policy notes "We may share information that you submit and any non-personally identifiable information we collect with Google, Inc. and agents of orkut in accordance to the terms and conditions of this Privacy Policy," according an FAQ on the site. Fix that recursion!
Don't you know it is now both immoral and criminal to think beyond the next quarterly report?
So how do you get in? (to see what it is and how it works?
"Consider how lucky you are that life has been good to you so far. Alternatively, if life hasn't been good to you so far
Friendster and Orkut
A few days ago ronebofh handed me an invite to Orkut, Google's new Friendster clone. I played with this for about 48 hours, adding and inviting various friends to my network and reading the messages that percolated through the network -- probably the only feature of Orkut I'll get much use out of. I'm a married person, not looking for a date, and not living in the Bay Area.
The topic of every message: Orkut itself. According to one message, any random friendless person can conveniently post a message that reaches thousands of users via their friend "networks." In other words, insanely convenient spammage. Another poster replied that this sort of endless nitpicking is sure to turn Orkut into yet another "hippie echo chamber." I think they opened for the Flaming Lips last week at the Trocadero.
Tonight Orkut has been shut down to "implement some improvements and upgrades suggested by users." In their defense, the Google staff point out that Orkut is in beta and they did warn us this sort of thing could happen. Ticked off, I decided to check out Friendster, which I somehow skipped up until now.
When I got to Friendster's site, I was surprised to see that Friendster also describes itself as a "beta" version. And that gave me some sympathy for the Orkut administrators, who are only trying to use the word "beta" to mean what "beta" is supposed to mean:
- Beta means "outsiders are welcome to play with this, but don't trust it with your life."
- Beta means "we have run out of ways to break it ourselves and really need some outside input now."
- Beta means "if something breaks, that's good; give us specific and detailed feedback, and don't whine."
This is a pretty accurate description of what Orkut is doing. Is this really an accurate description of what Friendster is doing, after three years? Or are they just afraid to call it a finished product and invite the level of criticism that is appropriate for a finished product? No wonder people don't understand that Google's staff are acting appropriately when they take the beta version of Orkut down for a while to fix the important problems users have pointed out.But "beta" is not the most offensive phrase on the Friendster home page. "Patent pending" is much worse. A patent on online social networking? I'd laugh if it wasn't so... no, wait, I am laughing. Give me a break, here. Surely this is nonsense no one takes seriously. Right?
Wrong, wrong, wrong, according to this news.com story. sixdegrees patented online "social networking" sites in 2001. Two Friendster-like sites have acquired the patent. Now everyone in the field is furiously writing patent applications.
I'd like to invite you all over for a beer, but I can't afford the intellectual property fees.
Check out the Apostrophe open-source CMS: http://www.apostrophenow.com/
Dear orkut.com users,
Wow.
I can't believe how buggy my software was. People have been flaming me non-stop since it launched!
Based on your suggestions, I will be deleting everyone I don't like/agree with. There are so many of you it will take a few days. I also hope you didn't notice that it was slowing down to friendster-esque speeds right before I shut it off. I'll have some nice surprises in the way of criminally ugly UI components when I bring it back online. I'll spam you to start using it again once I've deleted all references to how insecure the service is.
Thanks for being guinea pigs in my side-project of seeing how much press I can personally get by dropping Google's good name.
stay beautiful,
Orkut Buyukkokten
Then join the invite only channels ...
Oh wait !!! Nobody is gonna invite us !
Don't you know it is now both immoral and criminal to think beyond the next quarterly report?
(In addition to not being as slow as dirt, I mean.)
One of the obvious and natural things for a site like this is to try and link people together via shared interests, quirks, ideals, memberships, and so on.
Friendster lets you list these things, but has a terrible search interface -- if you like the band Poster Children, you can say so, but then trying to find other people with the same interet will reveal everyone who mentions either "poster" or "children". Basically, broken.
People try to work around this by creating fake "people" for abstract ideas -- there's a whole article about it at Salon. But the Friendster site people, instead of capitalizing on this, decided t hat this "subversion" is a plague trying to destroy their system. And, this work-around does make the social network part less useful -- having no way of distinguishing links between real people from those via Mickey Mouse is a problem.
Instead of trying to kick every abstract concept, cartoon character, university mascot, and geek web site logo off of the network, these things should be *encouaged*, but defined as separate from real people. It's both more fun *and* more useful. And it's exactly what Orkut does -- in addition to your own entry, anyone can create a "Community", and join as many such communities as they like.
So, Orkut is cooler because they have this feature -- but even more because they understand *why* to have it.
This sounds to me like those psych games of "you can't have it" to make you want something you did not want. If I have to jump through a hoop to join something, then I do not want anything to do with it.
Also, did anyone read their privacy statement. Looks like they not only share your personal information with 3rd parties, but they also share whatever information you send in your messeges to other members and people you invite.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
It still ran quickly, but like infestations of mice, people were going where they shouldn't, exposing the systems weaknesses. :)
:)
Translation: Users were able to do things they weren't supposed to... no need for security holes when you have wide open doors.
Any new commercial service/application/video game is in beta version since some years ...
Companies just have to market the "new features" to sell their products and then will use the cash to fix some of the most obvious bugs, or use the crowd to test their products instead of paying beta testers.
Don't you know it is now both immoral and criminal to think beyond the next quarterly report?
Why is chatting with girls so great? It's not like a) they have something interesting to say most of the time and b) you won't get laid by chatting with someone who lives in another state or country.
In case anyone wants a little more information their help section And no, I'm not a member, I was looking around, got a 404 and managed to find my way there.
Of users or people running the system?
The user percentage of females was easily almost equal to males with many females creating new communities and inviting their own friends to grow the network.
My friends list on Orkut was more female than male.
--- I do not moderate.
... to go neural. :-)
I guess they could do some serious AI with those lots and lots of thousands of CPUs they got.
.. searches for material on that site? ... cached pages that won't die perhaps?
if you want people to think you know what you are talking about, just put ".com" at the end of everything you say.com
Are you a fag, or just a 13 year old girl?
Orkut has very fine levels of control on how your private information is shared among strangers, friends and friendsOfFriends unlike many of the other networking community sites. They seem to have taken a look at many of the other sites and fixed a lot of the more obvious problems.
However the site was taken down because it wasn't doing any input validation so fine grained user security or not info was easily obtained by any random person.
--- I do not moderate.
whoever modded this insightful is a fucktard. yeah that's right, a fucktard.
Membership to orkut is by invitation only.
If you have a friend who's a member of orkut, have them invite you to join.
Damn their elitest ways... didn't want to joing their stupid cult anyway *stomps off*
Look up Dr. Bastard and find the one with the woman with a kid who needs love. He says to tape the kids arms together and use that. "As Tyrone grows, so will his 'thang'".
Someone post a mirror!
Your credit card information wants to be free.
I agree with the other guy; specifically: (a) that you should go fuck yourself and (b) that you're a tool
Peace be with you.
"she is also a PLUS-SIZE model."
Orkut, while done by a Google employee, is not part of Google itself, and if you do a traceroute, it is not hosted at Google's servers or network.
George W. Bush
President, United States of America
Rejected by geeks! What could be worse??
~.Evanrude
I watched the population size from Saturday 1/25 10am (PST) to Sunday 1pm (PST). It grew pretty steadily all day, from 5,349 to 8,662 users over a 24 hour period. Of course, by this time, the abuse on broadcast messages etc. was rampant.
Hi all !
I'm Charly an unknown web/developper working on a smiliar system. It's called "BBS parano" and it's using the Paranoia(tm) RPG rules.
Now imagine friendster or Orkut with some RED, YELLOW or GREEN clearance... and "The computer" getting really crazy... Up to 500 citozen after 2 months of coding.
Any one remember the old Paranoia(tm) RPG here ?
Charly
Ref: http://www.parano.be (french)
_____________________________________
[*] The Computer is your friend [*]
Orkut Buyukkokten's pic
How orkut.com users want Orkut Buyukkokten to be
He seems to like PDAs: His projects
His publications
Don't you know it is now both immoral and criminal to think beyond the next quarterly report?
i like ascii art goatse. its like seeing an old friend in a new way.
wow this is fucking newsworthy... lets follow the ups and downs of each individual website on the net with daily reports
...a few months after going public. As with most companies who go public, the goal becomes shareholder value - at all costs.
You watch how Google slowly goes down the tubes as itchy investors (who spent too much damn money on the stock in the first place), expect *BIG* returns. This doesn't always happen. I believe most companies in fact improve after going public. But investing idiots (see SCOX) risk huge amounts of money betting on tech stocks and so the pressure to perform often outweighs what would be considered REASONABLE returns for most.
I don't want to see it happen, so don't think this is some sort of troll - but I know all too well the record of high flying tech companies like this. When their focus changes, the service will start to suck.
Not to be redundant but Yahoo! pissed me off in much the same way - over what most would think was such a little thing. Yahoo! used, USED to be my home page. Then they started using intrusive and annoying flash ads. I accepted that, but then they did the unthinkable - they STOLE MY CURSOR!
Look, just because they're my home page doesn't mean I always want to search for something. In fact 9/10ths of the time I just want to type in an address.
So when you combine the two features, you have me opening up my browser and immediately start to type something like 'www.somethingorother.com' in their SEARCH BAR instead of the address field. Arrrgh!
And...
It's....
OUTTA THERE!
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
No Homers...
This sig is in Spanish when you're not looking....
I think the site is down due to many security issues/flaws. People were sending messages to the entire userbase, and more significantly, people were able to delete accounts that weren't theirs... Myself and quite a few of my friends' accounts were deleted, and it seems good that Google locked the door for a while until the iron out some of these major kinks.
Search + Social Networking = Eurekster Too bad google doesnt do what Eurekster does and combine its excelent search capabilites with social networking.
here you can see him fucking a tree stump or whatever:
g
http://www.stanford.edu/~orkut/bwphotos/p106.jp
So Google will go the been-there-done-that route Yahoo has taken of copying any service they can't buy??
look how many people use AIM.
Slow news day?
Perhaps this post is flamebait, troll, and offtopic, and a general bitch (which is why I am posting AC...) But I fail to see what the importance of "Hey guys, Orkut is down!" aside from letting everyone know that Google projects arent bullet proof...
Though, please enlighten me if you can.
How much does anyone want to bet that these improvements involve moving away from Windows and Active Server Pages for their page serving tech?
It doesn't make much financial or strategic sense. I can almost see the conversation over the weekend: "Wow, the site is popular and growing exponentially! We need to add another two or three servers... Google's got thousands, so that isn't a problem, so now we just need to buy more copies of Windows Server..." (Or who knows, maybe even pay for the version they were using in the first place.
I'd put money on a PHP version of the site replacing it. Any takers?
-Russ
Me
Mediachest is another social software / friendster type site that allows you to create real-life P2P borrowing networks out of the physical items that you own. It supports integration into existing online and offline communities through its group system, and doubles as an inventory tracking site with public lists of what you own so that you can show them off to your friends or members of web forums you frequent.
My DVD and Game Collection Tracking L
In Finnish, "orkut" means "orgasms"... :)
I can look at it right now...but not get in seeing as I haven't been invited. Was the main page down with that message or did it only pop up if you tried logging in?
haha this is some funny stuff =)
Don't you know it is now both immoral and criminal to think beyond the next quarterly report?
You have to link it to caldera.com now ;]
Google is blocking the SCO bomb...
6,175,831
Method and apparatus for constructing a networking database and system
Abstract
A networking database containing a plurality of records for different individuals in which individuals are connected to one another in the database by defined relationships. Each individual has the opportunity to define the relationship which may be confirmed or denied. E-mail messaging and interactive communication between individuals and a database service provider provide a method of constructing the database. The method includes having a registered individual identify further individuals and define therewith a relationship. The further individuals then, in turn, establish their own defined relationships with still other individuals. The defined relationships are mutually defined.
We claim:
1. A networking database system comprising:
a communication port;
a web server connected to the communication port;
a database containing a plurality of records;
a database server connected to the database for operating on said database;
a database connectivity engine connected to the web server for preprocessing the output of the web server and connected to the database server;
a queue watcher coupled to said database server for queuing outgoing e-mails;
a mail server operatively connected to the communication port to receive incoming e-mails, and connected to said queue watcher to transmit outgoing e-mail; and
a parser connected to the mail server to process incoming e-mails and connected to the database server;
wherein the database server is responsive to the parser processing to manipulate a record in the database, and selected ones of said plurality of records are linked to selected other ones of said plurality of records by a confirmed defined relationship or a denied defined relationship.
2. The system of claim 1 wherein a first incoming e-mail contains a formcode and the parser is operable to identify the formcode, wherein the database server responds to the identified formcode to update or generate records in said database.
3. The system of claim 1 further comprising a network coupled to said web server at said communication port operable to connect a first user to said web server.
4. The system of claim 3 wherein the network supports communications of said incoming and outgoing e-mails.
5. The system of claim 3 wherein said first incoming e-mail is associated with a first user and a first outgoing e-mail is associated with a second user and wherein the first incoming e-mail and first outgoing e-mail further comprise information regarding a first relationship between said first user and said second user.
6. The system of claim 5 wherein said plurality of records further comprises a first record and a second record corresponding to said first and second users, respectively, and wherein said database server operates on said first and second records to update said first relationship between said first record and said second record to one of a confirmed defined relationship and a denied defined relationship.
7. The system of claim 6 further comprising a third user on said network, wherein said database server updates said second record in response to an incoming e-mail and a formcode in an e-mail from said third user.
8. The system of claim 6 further comprising a third user on said network, wherein said database server updates said second record in response to an input from said third user at said communication port.
9. The system of claim 6 wherein each of said plurality of records further includes a security code.
10. The system of claim 9 further comprising an input corresponding to said second user, the input being a function of said security code, and wherein said input contains data corresponding to said second user.
11. The system of claim 10 further comprising a third user on said network, wherein said input further comprises a second relat
Given the news coverage Orkut received, it's not at all surprising it went down. The traffic must have been extraordinary.
I'm waiting to see how long it will take for a virus to be socially engineered around this:
Congratulations! A friend of yours has invited you to join Orkut. Just open the following executable to install the Orkut browser and join the dynamic online community of thousands.
[orkutinstaller.exe]
Why not? No one who hasn't been invited knows how the invitations are supposed to go. It was a bit careless of google not to consider this.
Orkut - Kaput?
---------
George W. Bush in 2004!
fdd at vt d0t edu
Ah, the internet. Where the men are men, the women are men, and the kids are undercover police officers.
Heh. Funny how if Google screws up a little (which, honestly, they are working out bugs) they don't get trashed.
Microsoft does it -- well, damn. Watch hell break loose.
Just something I noticed. Rate me how you will. I honestly don't care.
Well, if that were the case, after the first kick there would be nobody left. In summary, I agree that yes, it would improve the quality of IRC.
Huh? Orkut's Palace of Love?
Hmm what kind of social network are they running?
People who are important in one way or another, and thus the ones everybody would like to reach, shun them because they don't need yet more people to bother them. So in the end, the only people who really use them are: kids, geeks, loners, and losers. It is quite ironical that Orkut should try to look like some kind of elitist club. Who in their right mind would want to be part of that club?
How did they pick the initial 12,000 anyway?
Looks interesting, but it is fairly hard to try if you don't know anyone who joined in the first place.:(
guess... nobody's gonna invite me ...huh !!!
I can't believe that no one has mentioned that this was built using .NET. And now it's down because it couldn't handle the stress. That's almost TOO easy, c'mon. No MS bashing? I'm disappointed.
"For a successful technology, honesty must take precedence over public relations for nature cannot be fooled." -Feynman
How exactly does okrut get it's initial user base if it's invite only?
Scalability? Enough said. Maybe they are rewriting it in php now. :)
What happened to the Google I knew?
I thought they were around catalogue the world's information, and make it easy to find what you were looking for, or something like that. This closed door club thing they're sponsoring doesn't really fit that mold all too well.
I know there's been rumors about a Google IPO for years, could this be an early indication of Google selling its soul to the market? As The Register points out, a lot of money has been flowing into these little friend meetup thing sites.
Before we could learn to pronounce it, it was shut down. It's not that the servers are melting with the rapid rise to ~3 million page views or 500th most popular site in a couple of days. It's not a conspiracy of data collection or a learning curve. orkut, which should really be named Oogle, demonstrated that a high performance explicit social networking site, well designed for digital immeadiate gratification (one local engineer personally even complained they had to click from map to profile to add a friend), supported by brand and with the right root can unleash latent demand. I would say this is reflective of the dearth of social capital in our society, but aside from such heady stuff, frictionless whuffie fun, huh? Latent demand for what is the question. Internet researchers would die excruciating deaths in search of the last days of data. I would venture a guess that most of the digerati that was already pre-conditions by existing services, an incomprehensible demographic that grants hypergrowth to the best, grants the best feedback, but easily taketh away. okurt doesn't work because it lacks constraints. Nothing hold people back. Nobody knows what a friend means. No social capital on the line. Its so fun and easy, choices and incentives are irrational. Normally this would raise questions. Some constraints make good social compact. Some constraints on openness curb pollution (spam, security). One of the better constraints is price because it lead to profit. However, AdSense is relatively frictionless. It adds new constraints while adding value. Same could be said for other well targeted forms of content, like blog posts...
Mr. helmut, In the last few months, the moderators on here have begun drinking a new drink in their spare time, and it is composed of 1 part fresh orange juice, 1 part feces, and 1 part asshole. They have become so full of shit, that it is unbelievable. I found it funny that you got modded Troll twice in this discussion, but more funny like the way I find an airplane crash funny, like it's sad and funny. Yes, moderators have taken to consuming shitshakes and are leaking it out of their acne-riddled faces, leaking shit onto the boards that are slashdot. It is sad, but Slashdot is dying. Congratulations on making your site, and I would sign up if I gave a shit about online social networks (I don't), but I think you deserve credit, and whoever modded you as a troll is a walking pile of ass shit with a hairy ball stuffed down its mouth. I will now metamoderate and hope I can find that asshole and unfair his putrid balls out.
Think of the information sites like this collect, and think doubly before paticipating.
They get to know who signed up who, TONS of personal details that many people reveal, age, approximate locations, who they know, how they are all connected... you didn't think this was done out of pure goodwill, did you?
OF course they won't destroy the data.. it's too valuable.
I can't believe how many people blindly just give it all up to some site just becuase it's fun.
Google is a great search engine, and has some great tools..but think for a minute about how much information they are amassing.
It seemed like an ideal candidate to be swallowed up by Google, Yahoo, MSN or AOL - as a service to offer to bring in users or whatever.
I mean, I think at least Google could have thrown the hardware and bandwidth at it it so desperately needs?
I think this guy can help.
Dear Orkut Users,
Unfortunately, my parents came back from vacation, and they immediately noticed the tire marks on the lawn, even though we did our best to paint them over in a matching color. Things went downhill from there, as my mother caught the little bit of remaining vomit smell from the bathroom, and then my dad decided to check the four bags of trash that were stacked up on top of the cans. Fortunately he didn't find the bong, but the six cases of empties were pretty hard to deny - all three of my cover stories were rejected out of hand. I think the neighbors told him about the police coming by.
As a result I'm grounded, and my root password has been revoked, so orkut.com will pretty much be offline for the next few months. It's a real bummer, because my vision for revolutionizing online social networks will have to be postponed while I repaint the den.
Sorry my parents are so uncool.
0rkut.
This is doomed to fail..
I mean come on.. Geeks know nobody.. so they pass it to their geek friends who pass it to their geek friends.. They make up these special clubs and languages so they can feel special.
So funny
"
Membership to orkut is by invitation only.
If you have a friend who's a member of orkut, have them invite you to join. "
bah hahaha
Dons Tinfoil Hat
I tell ya, this is matchmaking for our the elite society.
Should have been called ORGYT.
Funny how you mention the "getting on" part...
"Orkut" is a Finnish slang term for multiple orgasms.
Antti S. Brax - Old school - http://www.iki.fi/asb/
What do you expect? Just because Google released a service, it's supposed to be immune the swarms of Slashdot users? We showed them! =)
They definately were red flag touches. the goddamn referee he had in the back seat kept on raising up this red flag every time he touched my junk but did batman care? NO WAY! He just kept on doing it.
Hahahahah... thanks!
They have a special word for multiple orgasms? Gross.
2 (or so) years ago, before friendster and all its look-alikes, there was a service called club nexus. It had the built in trust system that to sign up you had to have a stanford.edu so only students and faculty of stanford could join. The guy who ran it was a cs grad student named orkut. Club nexus seemed to morph in a Stanford Alumni Associate service called incircle powered by "Affinity Engines". It looks like orkut how now joined google. Congrats.
how comes, that I don't not want to tell the same party that I ask what I am looking for on the web, who I am, what my interrests are and who my friends are ...?
Smells like gates of hell to me.
Not signing up for Orcus unless there is another decent search engine on the horizon...
-silence
Dyslectics of the world, untie!
Here's a page from the wayback machine dating 1997 describing friendsters et al. The last reference on the wayback machine is in april 1999...
...they are Europeans who also target Americans, not Americans who allow meek Europeans to join. ...they have a strong "MLM verboten" policy and actually kick abusers who spam or try to recruit for MLM pyramid schemes. ...they are really fast and pretty damn good in usability.
Why? 'Orkut' means 'multiple orgasms' in finnish slang, and not just any regional slang but in pretty much nationwide spoken language.
It's fun, but I still think twice before I send anyone an invitation email with subject: "Come and join me in Orkut!". People would think that I'm sending them porn site advertisements or proposing inappropriate action in the middle of a day and most likely wouldn't even open the mail but flame me instead.. sigh :D
Well, I suppose we're still a tiny percent of world population but f.ex. Linkedin.com has a huge percent of finns logged in their service and we do have globally operating companies like Nokia :)
But, this is quite hilarious anyway.. heheh
-el
who ..."
socialsoftwareweb reports - "... Right now it is 'invitation only...' Google employees, and friends of Google employees make up the 'orkut' membership
privacy ..."
register reported - "... Google has attempted to play down the relationship with Orkut, although each page is branded "in affiliation with Google." The Privacy Policy notes "We may share information that you submit and any non-personally identifiable information we collect with Google, Inc. and agents of orkut in accordance to the terms and conditions of this Privacy Policy," according an FAQ on the site
I trawled thru google. looks like they are not crawling through orkut yet.
peterrenshaw ~ Another Scrappy Startup
Orkut.com? Whoa! That means "orgasms" in Finnish.
Hey! Here is a member of the secretive Orkut network (sect?) coming out and publicly admitting it despite the obvious fact that he would be flooded with invite-requests...
They can probably alleviate some finacial pressure by selling the information orkut gathers to their NSA and other fed buddies..
"where words meet intent, lies rhetoric's lament"
It says:
Membership to orkut is by invitation only.
If you have a friend who's a member of orkut, have them invite you to join.
Is this like chicken before the egg or egg before chicken?
This sounds eerily similar to Orlok.
I wonder if orkut is going to become the word for 'dating service' as google has
become the word for 'search engine'.
"Orkut" doesn't have to become the word for anything - it already has its meaning. "Orkut" is Finnish and it means an orgasm.
They actually picked up a very amusing name. 'Orkut' is the slang word for orgasm in Finnish.
hapo
Terms of service are really weird... And will somebody invite me finnaly?
Sinisa
Then there's the issue of it being hacked. Sometime early Sunday morning it seems that some enterprising soul changed the default community icon to (I'm not making this up) the goatse pix. Sunday afternoon they pulled the site down, I guess because enough newbies complained about seeing images that'll take years to forget.
s/Orkut/Hackit/g
Need a Linux consultant in New Orleans?
As a joke, I created a couple of communities like "Community For People Who Don't Join Communities" and "Orkut, for people who are users of Orkut." Turns out I got about 15 members of the Orkut community, who actually began discussing stuff! The nerve!
So I renamed the community to "Barry Manilow fans", and changed the image for the group to this. Alas, I went out for the day soon after, and by the time I came back, Orkut was down, so I never did see what happened, if people noticed or what.
That being said, it was nice to be able to create them for legit groups, like "Computer Authors" and so on.
I'm confused: if orkut.com membership is available only by invitation of an existing member, how did anyone manage to become a member in the first place? What criteria were used to pick the initial members?
How can you be certain that your initial membership choices were truly free of unintended discrimination against various demographic groups? I worry that, if your initial membership wasn't just perfect, the extrapolated result of those members' invitation choices may be a cascade or domino effect, resulting in whatever minute demographic exclusions might have existed initially becoming far more pronounced over time.
That's a fine membership model for elitist country clubs, but I hope that wasn't really your intention.
google are really good with the hype granted (pulling it down for over load is such a good pr move...) but ICQ actually just launched their universe (universe.icq.com) and there you can actually see the connections between people, that's something no one did...