Notes from my terminal

Orkut

So, no blogging from the conference I mentioned earlier. Maybe I'll write something about it later, maybe not. But now for something completely different: Orkut hit my social group heavily in the last days. I know, a bit late, but with it being an invite-only system (one of its major strengths) I guess it first had to go around the US a bit before coming to someone in Germany who'd invite me. At least I didn't have to beg for it nor did I have to fork out money. Obviously, not everyone is happy with Orkut. The arguments against it seem to come from two camps: the paranoiacs and those annoyed by popularity games.

I don't get some of the of the paranoid arguments (after all, it's your responsibility which data you give out and I find it highly improbable that any three letter organization would hire a hitman to go after you just because you entered the wrong favourite cuisine in your Orkut profile), but some of the more rational critics point to the actually highly debatable terms of services. I do however believe that the fun and convenience you can get out of Orkut is currently higher than the actual risk of Orkut abusing your personal data.

The popularity game is something that can be annoying on Orkut. On Orkut, you are not a free woman or man, you are a number. Getting measured by your ability to climb into the "top 9" that are displayed can be irritating. If you take the term Orkut uses for your connections or contacts seriously (Orkut only lets you call them "friends"), you can become bitter. After all, you're collecting "friends" like Pokémon cards ("gotta have them all!").

Orkut could fix that easily. Drop the word "friend" with its emotional baggage. Like many others, I have 2 or maybe 3 persons in my life I'd regard as friends, on Orkut I have 56 at the moment. Stop the number games and the sorting of your "friends" list based on the number of "friends" they have. That's a common trend with statistical data: Display numbers and graphs and users will try to drive them up to absurd values. Instead of making everyone your "friend", maybe FOAF with its richer vocabulary for relationships would have been a wiser choice in the first place.

But what can you actually use Orkut for? Is it just ego-boosting and collecting? Is it all maintainance and no value? I think there are at least two serious things you could use it for.

1. You can publish your contact data (address, telephone number etc.) to a fuzzy group of "friends" that will likely not abuse that information, but put it to good use without giving your data out to the whole Internet. Likewise, you can ask a group you don't actually know (friends of friends) for help (I received a message by someone looking for a martial arts dojo in Amsterdam, sent to his friends of friends) and hope they can help you. In the case of the Amsterdam guy I wasn't able to help, but since he's from the Netherlands, he correctly guessed that many of his "friends of friends" would be Dutch as well.
2. Because on Orkut everyone has at least one contact, there's a system of social control. This might make Orkut's (badly implemented) discussion boards less troll-infested. But this is just my guess, the system needs to grow more for us to see this.

In conclusion, Orkut's a neat toy. I might get bored by it pretty soon and I am perfectly aware of its faults and shortcomings, but I find the experiment to play around with actual social networking data exciting. And I can see ways of making it more enjoyable to use Orkut: What we now need is an Orkut client, scraping your friends' contact data and feeding it into your address book. Any takers?