January 25, 2004
orkut
Orkut is the social networking site du jour, and it's certainly getting a lot of attention on the net.
Now, I joined this morning, and the thing I see that it lacks is innovation. Just where are the new ideas? It borrows bits from all the other social networking sites, tries to get you to fill out an anal probe of a profile, makes a pretense of being about business networking, but tries its hardest to be a dating site at every turn.
Why aren't they exploring different ways of defining relationships? A friend is not a friend is not a friend (this is a really hard problem, that the FOAF community has thought a lot about). How about when you accept a friend, you point them towards a few other friends they might have something in common with?
This implementation isn't bad: it's quick, and some of the action interactions are nice (no reloading of the entire page). I find the pale pastel blue, and use of fonts (especially the font with letters made out of people) to be really far too hippy for my tastes. It's certainly not clean design, with bad graduated borders placed over photos, and standard link blue on a pale blue background.
You can tell it's written in California - it asks far too many questions about 'body art', and has absolutely no understanding of non-US addresses. It does some geographic searches on zipcode, but doesn't understand anything foreign. Even worse, the box for zipcode or postcode isn't long enough for a UK code.
Most interesting to me is that the people on it are just kicking the tyres and try to hack the system. It's the same people who are on all the other social networking sites, which leads me to believe the orkut craze may not last very long at all. Sites like these need a long-term community to survive, but there can only be so many active users on this kind of service, and it's rapidly reaching the point where users are spread too thin.
New ideas are what's needed. Sites like del.icio.us and metafilter got a community without trying, as they were truly innovative, easy to use, and are run by people passionate about usable, useful software. You can only have so many friends(ters).
(oh, and it's poncily invitation only, so if you want a shoo-in, email me)
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