1. sneJ on January 26, 2004 12:19 AM writes...

"orkut doesn’t work because it lacks constraints. Nothing holds people back. Nobody knows what a friend means."

Quite. It turns out that one of the odd features of LiveJournal — that its "friend" mechanism combines social networking, aggregation and access privileges — actually works in its favor in this regard. There is a definite price to pay for adding someone as a friend: they get to read your non-public posts.

(Yes, it is possible to use friend groups to hide posts even from certain friends, but this is awkward to set up and less commonly used; and the friend=privileged equation gets drummed into your head very early on in your LJ learning curve.)

I also think another aspect of what makes Orkut (and Friendster et al) not work is that there's no "there" there. The lack of personal journals/blogs makes the individual content sort of hollow. All you are given to learn about someone is pictures and a few short blurbs, which is nothing compared to stalking through their last few months of journal posts.

2. Marc Canter on January 26, 2004 2:27 AM writes...

Trying to lock everything into a black or white - "friend" or not - is the root of the problem (IMHO.) That's why our PeopleAggregator FOAF based social network - has varying levels of degrees of explicit 'relationships'.

Starting from 'Close Friend' and then 'Friend' (both of which need email verification) we relax our defintion of the relationships by calling the next relationship you can have with someone - an 'Acquaintance', then a "Know by Reputation" and then "Know in Passing". which (to me are nice ways of lessening the quality and depth of the relationship, while still acknowledging it's existence.

We then have a relationship type - called 'Related to' (for family relationships) and finally - we end with a blank "I don't know you, but I want to know you' kind of acknowledgement of a desire to start a relationship.

These 7 levels of relationship certainly aren't perfect, the best or even a full range of emotions (notice we stayed away from any sort fo negative relationships.) But we DID create a scale of sorts - from very close to not at all - that represents the REAL nature of relationships - which answers the premise of Ross' complaint.

I agree that social networks need to go beyond just offering someone to be "your friend" or not. Granualarities of relationships are the way to go. It's the only way explicit digital social networks will ever be successful.

3. Frank Ruscica on January 26, 2004 8:20 AM writes...

Friendster—4M, Tribe—68K, LinkedIn—65K, and Ryze—80K

4. mark pincus on January 26, 2004 6:34 PM writes...

response to previous comment...actually, tribe.net has 98,699 registered as of yesterday which is exactly 6 months past launch.

5. Denounce on January 27, 2004 1:44 PM writes...

Orkut schmorkut. The latest and greatest social network is Amazon's new Pricekut service, just announced:

http://www.denounce.com/archives/000049.html

:-)

6. azdreni on January 29, 2004 12:56 PM writes...

tung si jeni aje ni mir qka po ban

7. milk on January 30, 2004 9:32 PM writes...

re: what sneJ said, i thought i'd just note; from livejournal.com's latest news post "One of our big goals for February is to split up the overloaded concept of "friends", turning it into separate categories relating to who you read on your friends page, who you trust to read your entries, who you know in real life, etc. This will allow us to cluster this information and put it into memcache, so we'll be freeing up system resources along the way."

8. milk on January 30, 2004 10:27 PM writes...

doh, that's what happens when one has to trawl through 30 rss2jabber bot messages (several days news).

9. E. L. on February 1, 2004 2:00 AM writes...

Actually, I stumbled onto your webpage from Orkut.

I came into Orkut from a rather interesting and odd way: a nexus-like friend of mine offered access, and I accepted due to curiosity about this social experiment.

Now to be truthful, I am not anywhere in the so-called "technocrati." I got myself out of Reston right around the dot com crash, and signed up for one of the most technologically redundant jobs on the planet.

LJ certainly has its issues with the concept of "friends" and whatnot, but having names and faces makes the social process even more awkward. For me, that ups the social ante. How does one make friends here, other than exchanging virtual cards? I found myself including my LJ address in an attempt to fill that social gap in a person's consciousness.

Anyways, your post was thought-provoking. Thank you.

-Regards,
E.

10. Craig Hubley on February 4, 2004 4:02 PM writes...

Why threads suck: orkut is not permanently down, obviously, it's back up again. Now anyone who thought it was down forever and wrote about that in the above, looks like an idiot, and can't edit. Wikis are far preferable as you don't have to read all kinds of obsolete stuff. So Orkut doesn't work in part because of lack of wiki or repository facilities to build any common base of knowledge or statement about the world.

It also doesn't really filter well as to values: in the best Internet dating sites (a couple of which I had more than a small role in designing) a great deal of energy goes into assessing each other's moral stances, not just "interests" or things one finds amusing in passing (like sex tricks, which are important for one night stands, but which in the long run, really anyone could learn if they cared to satisfy their "friend").

Explicit ranking of relationships is yet another foolish technocrat solution. Always with the systems, never with the actual relationships... Rigorized systems of reputation are... hmm... bad?

11. anon on February 9, 2004 5:14 PM writes...

http://www.firstadopter.com/forums/showthread.php?threadid=57

orkut invites available there

12. Peter da Silva on February 10, 2004 9:55 PM writes...

Bloomed? faded? Dead? Goodness, and I just got on a couple of days ago.

Tell you what, you tell me what you think "success" means, and what you think Orkut's supposed to be, and then you can start talking about whether it's "succeeded" or "failed".

Of course, any definitions that are worth using won't even begin to apply to the actual software and network for months.

Or years.

I mean, sheesh, Usenet's the first "social network" I ever joined, and it's been declared dead maybe a thousand times since it was first put together as a kind of "poor man's ARPAnet" back when the idea of a "public ARPAnet" was controversial and the "Internet" was still being designed. When LJ's still going good after a quarter of a century you can start thinking about making fun of a month-old baby like Orkut. Hopefully by then you'll know better.

13. Biff Vernon on February 15, 2004 9:11 AM writes...

Why has nobody invited me to Orkut yet? :-(
Biff

14. Sasha Sergeev on March 9, 2004 3:59 AM writes...

The future of social networks should be providing much more flexible social behavior and interconnecting networks with each other.
What we see in social networks is only the starting level of SN. You will see how everything will change within coming years.
BTW, I never seen Orkut, nobody still invited me, but I am a member of other networks.

15. anil on April 11, 2004 6:48 PM writes...

Yea, I think we can expect more from a second generation version of SN's.

myskewl.com for instance has some kind of a friend describing feature. You pick a bunch of adjectives that describe your friend and people will be able to search other people that match certain charactertic(s).

16. Amir Sadjadpour on May 18, 2004 5:54 PM writes...

Orkut can be developed into an effective tool in management, poliical movements and community building. But it seems that it is not able to provide service for as many people who amy would like to be involved in it. The system is down most of the time and this will result in a draw back.

17. Amir Sadjadpour on May 27, 2004 6:38 PM writes...

Orkut is working just fine, right now.
I am satisfied with some improvements.
I rather having more privacy though.

18. Rodrigo on July 1, 2004 4:19 PM writes...

Orkut work's beacause it's like an easy-to-join forum. It's easy to starter users to join any forum community and, since it's growing more and more, people can talk about anything.