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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'"
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.
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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.
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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!
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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/
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
...and without Friendster's poor stability...
Recapping our top story: Orkut is down at the moment.
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.