Orkut

Woke up this morning with a real mess of a hangover. As a consequence I wasn’t very useful to the world during the AM hours.
However, I did get invited to sign up for another one of those social-networking networks. This one’s called Orkut, and it’s underwritten by everyone’s favorite search engine. It’s in beta. It’s like Friendster in concept, but better executed. First and foremost reason it’s better? It’s fast. Something I’ve never seen from Friendster, which was slow to the point where I didn’t want to look at it. Orkut is joyously fast right now — and hopefully with Google backing it, it will stay that way.
Second: they’ve assimilated a concept which started out on Friendster as an abuse of the friend system — creating a non-person entity, like “trance”, “canada”, “portland” — which people would then become “friends” with in order to show their affiliation with said entity. Orkut has simply taken the concept and made it official, calling these entities “communities”.
I don’t think the facility to merge communities is there yet, but I guarantee it’ll be there shortly. While I was joining communities (a process which is almost too easy) I noticed many duplicates, especially within the music genre. I think I counted 5 devoted to drum and bass, three to Canada, three to Apple, two to Garageband, and two to Homestarrunner. There’s a group for Victoria, but nothing for UVic yet. I’m sure that’ll change in the next day or two, though. From what I’ve been able to discern, Orkut went into operation about 10 days ago. For now, the strategy is join all groups associated with an interest of mine, and unjoin the others as soon as one becomes the clear leader (through participant activity, most visible through the community forums).
Third — and this was really nice to see — Orkut is very conscious of people’s desire to control their information, so with almost every field of information you fill in, you can specify the privacy level (“myself”, “friends”, “friends of friends”, or “everyone”).
Finally (and this is where you come in) — when the members of a given community are displayed, they’re ordered by the number of friends said person has. Right now, I’m at the bottom of nearly every list! I need your help! Don’t be surprised if you get an email from me inviting you to join.. I hate being on the bottom! 😉