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...
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.
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
It doesn't sound like its thier webservers, more the software running Orkut.
101010b 2Ah 52o
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.
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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/
(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."
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?
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.
Yeah, just look at what happened with MindSpring. In 1995, before the big-boom, Charles Brewer had great control over his company and grew it amazingly well. Then as the boom hits, the company is showing a lot of promise. It has it's first profits, then investor greed got the best of them.
They bought Netcom, then merged with EarthLink. At this point, investor hype was all that mattered. The things that made MindSpring a great company were now forever gone. Great things being: top notch in-house support, their own network, their own developers, and everything that could run on open-source being run that way (it saves money!).. Now they are EarthLink, technical support is handled by rude people in India, they outsource their network from the bottom dollar bidders, and have put 3000+ people out of work. To offer better service? Nope. Just so a very select few can make a few more dollars.
I, personally, hope this activity destroys corporate america. I am not any sort of activist, I could just do without the excessive greed destroying everything good. Just because some other guy is the market leader, there is no reason to sacrifice your ethics to "win".
Good old Mindspring would still be a profitable business with it's 300,000 organic-growth customers.
Enjoy the churn, Mr. Sky Dayton. You shorted a lot of investors and are a criminal. I guess I should stop there, next thing you know the big, scarey church of Scientology will file a lawsuit against me for picking on their little boy.