Orkut

[cellio]

My reaction to the various friend networks (friendster, others, and now orkut) is approximately "eh, whatever" -- I don't seek them out, but I don't object to being part of them either. Heck, maybe they're even occasionally useful for something. Anyway, I know that a couple people whose journals I read were interested in getting onto orkut, which requires an invitation, and someone just invited me on, so if I know you and you're looking for an invitation, let me know. I generally do not offer up my friends' email addresses unbidden to sites like this, because you never know who's really just a slimy spammer with a ruse. But I'll add anyone I know who asks me to.

Comments

[msmemory.livejournal.com]

I'm interested to hear what you think of ORKUT. My sister-in-law invited us, but at first glance it looks like an efficient way for Google (which owns it) to collect a whole lot of personal demographic data -- which it could then correlate with my query patterns on Google itself. What does Orkut offer in the way of amenities -- blog space, photo hosting, chat communities, other? Their homepage doesn't want to tell you unless you click on Join.

Re:

[cellio]

Based on a five-minute browse:

It has communities, and apparently anyone can create new ones like on LJ. Each user has a "scrapbook", where you -- or other people -- can post apparently-arbitrary stuff. (You have to approve the stuff from other people.) I guess this can be used for photo albums, a journal, or whatever. The FAQ doesn't appear to mention any limitations on space, though I assume there are some. There also seems to be a messaging system that looks like generic web-based email but is probably limited to other Orkut users.

I am unlikely to use any of that myself, as the stuff I care about I can already do through other means. The networking aspect could possibly be useful at some point in the future (I'm thinking job foo more than social foo), and in general I don't object to making it a little easier for people I know to find me. I didn't provide any information that isn't already easily gettable about me (most of the fields are optional), so I'm not too worried about the googlification. I never give out the stuff that makes casual identity theft really easy, like SSN and birth date and stuff like that, and nothing I do would deter a determined thief.

So my verdict is: shrug -- could possibly help, unlikely to hurt, mostly ignore.

which it could then correlate with my query patterns on Google itself

Unless they're logging IP addresses for both Orkut access and Google searches, I'm not sure how they could do that. It's not like you have to give Google your email address in order to perform a search, after all. Am I missing something? I figure the bigger Google issue is that your Orkut stuff would show up when people search for you via Google, but if there's nothing new to learn there, maybe you don't care.

[tangerinpenguin.livejournal.com]

Unless they're logging IP addresses for both Orkut access and Google searches, I'm not sure how they could do that. It's not like you have to give Google your email address in order to perform a search, after all. Am I missing something?

Jeremy Zawodny's blog has an interesting discussion (http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/001504.html) of Orkut and just this sort of thing.

Re:

[cellio]

Ah, that's a good point. I actually do pay attention to cookies and clean out the accumulated dross periodically, but I hadn't considered the orkut.google.com approach that would let Google piggy-back on Orkut cookies. Hmm.