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'"
What is down about it? I don't see that notice and everything looks like its working.
101010b 2Ah 52o
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.
It doesn't sound like its thier webservers, more the software running Orkut.
101010b 2Ah 52o
(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.
It's hard to call orkut 'innovative', when it appears to be an exact clone of Friendster with Crushlink-sans-spam thrown in for good measure (and without Friendster's poor stability and abyssmal performance). I wouldn't be surprised, though, if orkut got some blogging capabilities integrated.. that could be kind of interesting
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.
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
...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..."
Did not the previous story end with a plea for an invitation?
What is the first thing a child does when you tell them they can't do something?
Don't people buy Tommy Hilfiger jackets?
Q.E.D.
KFG
I really don't think you'd want to meet a woman through slashdot. As messed up as male geeks tend to be, it's been my experience that female geeks at the same level of geekiness as most slashdotters, on average, far exceed males in social maladjustment.