Ornot
Well I was going to try to post something pithy, considered, and insightful about all this Orkut malarkey, but after Jeneane's recent torrent of excellent posts on this subject, there really isn't all that much left to say.
Having said that, of course, I'm still going to ramble the heck on anyway. I'm sure you wouldn't really expect anything less.
I have (like just about everyone else) some real doubts about these social networking thingies. An email from Tom Matrullo (a consummate gentleman who I've never met, and yet someone I consider a real friend) reminded me of our shared discomfort with the Friendster thing, back when that was, as Tom puts it, "the efriend machine of the moment".
I ended up quitting Friendster very shortly after I'd joined for a whole bunch of reasons and, as I just said to Tom, I still have grave misgivings about this rather ill-defined friend of a friend stuff.
Some of my concerns are linked to the issues David Weinberger eloquently identifies, when he says:
"Artificial Social Networks like Orkut get it backwards. They are built on explicit and precise declarations of relationship." (in the interests of balance, however, you should also check out Jeneane's response).
And yet, I have to confess that I am kind of relishing the inherent brokenness and cheesey, chintzy cheeriness (half dead and half alive ;-) of Orkut.
Yes, it's based on an inherently dodgy premise, and yes, the binary explicit declaration of friend/not a friend bugs me - but there's some fun to be had for a' that.
Perhaps part of the appeal of things like Orkut are the similarities such services bear to obsessive-compulsive collecting behaviour. There's something of the baseball card or beanie baby phenomena about Orkut and its ilk. It's not really about making new friends and expanding one's functioning business network - it's about collecting.
The little 'friend' pages with their cute, fuzzy-bordered photos and profile info even look kind of like trading cards.
And how much of the drive to spend time on Orkut is based on the urge to compare your personal whuffie stats with those of your peers? "Ooh look, Gary has 33 friends, I only have 19. Grrrrr. But then Simon only has 4. HA!"
The next logical step, of course, has to be for someone to build the Orkut Top Trumps game. Remember Top Trumps? For the uninitiated, this was a fab set of trading card games that were all the rage when I was at school in the UK in the late 70s. I guess they were the Yu Gi Oh of their day.
You had a set of cards with themed photos on one side (e.g. sports cars, military planes, sports stars, etc.) and a set of interesting stats on the other side (e.g. top speed, wing span, height). The game was all about winning cards from your opponent by correctly answering questions about the stats on the back of a card held up to you. "How many cylinders does this car's engine have?" - that kind of thing.
Collecting both real and faux friends through networking webspaces such as Orkut feels a lot like Top Trumps or some other card-swapping and collecting game (none of which I was ever terribly good at, btw).
You start off with a tiny circle of the few actual friends who invited you. Two or three little photos, each with their own oh-so-ironic profile comments. Then you start surfing through their networks, following links to friends you wish you had - building your collection as you go.
Oh look - he has a Pierre Omidyar. I wish I had a Pierre Omidyar. Wonder who Pierre has - ooh! ooh! A Wesley Clark!! Dang! That makes even my Esther Dyson look a little sick. Hmmm... I'll see your John Perry Barlow and raise you a Marc Andreessen and a Jeff Bezos...
Harrumph.
Two final thoughts (for now) on the topic of Orkut.
1. With absolutely no offense to the eponymous founder, I have to say that I'm finding it very hard to take the name 'Orkut' seriously - just reading the word makes me think of this.
2. Amen to that.
