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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...
So that explains why nobody invited me--the site's down.
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.
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
..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.
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?
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.
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.
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*
You don't. This service is right now only meant for the friends of the developers and their friends and their friends and their friends...
Those who are not 6 degrees of friendship away from the developers may be waiting a while.
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
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.
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?
...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.
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
You have it all wrong. If you do some research into this mess you will see that orkut (the service) is the side project of some guy named orkut. He happens to work at google. The servers are not hosted at google.
orkut (the guy) seems to like ASP. This is his side project. It's his call. He's paying for the servers and bandwidth out of his own pocket.
All of you slashdrones think this is some google-bet-the-company play into social software. The reality is much more mundane. It's some weird, lonely PhD who has a side project. He happens to work at a company everyone cares about.
If you read google's statements about this you will see that they don't particularly care. The only reason they might care is that all of this crazy, breathless bullsh*t is getting spread around.
it is not getting re-written. At least not until google actually starts contributing to the project. You will know when that day comes when they change the name to something less awful and a traceroute actually goes to a google-owned server.
My friends list on Orkut was more female than male.
Yeah, that's what they told you...
Put identity in the browser.
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.:(
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
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?
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.
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.
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
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.