the weblog of m.kelley

I’ve been playing around with orkut for about a week now (thanks Pete)and I have a couple of thoughts about the systems. Now I’m gonna comment about the back-end, mainly because I’m not a back-end geek. It’s running ASP and if that works for this system, then fine.
I think someone else mentioned this (maybe Bill Turner or Cory Doctorow), but I hate that you have to first become a “friend” to say that you’re a fan. I invited a couple of people whom I consider online “friends” and one person who is a friend in the real world. But there are many of you out there, that I’m a huge fan of and I hate that there is no grey area. You’re either a friend or you’re nothing, according to Orkut.
I played around with Friendster for about 20 minutes and really hated the site. Just didn’t mesh with me personally. I do like Orkut, but some of the groups are boring. Reminds me of AOL chat rooms, circa 1994/95. But we’re all getting to know each other, so this would almost be expected.
I signed up for a lot of groups, but in the coming days I’m gonna pair those down to around 3 groups. The Drummers group has kinda taken off. We’re a small bunch, but the messages are coming in a couple of times per day. The local Chattanooga group, for lack of a better work, sucks. Nothing going on, but then again it’s Chattanooga….not exactly the hotbed of technobabble.
It’s a neat toy to play around with, but I still don’t see the “revolution” coming from social software. The various sites still look like a cross between a dating board and a message board, and they’re nothing revolutionary. Yahoo Groups, MSN Groups, and the now dead Lycos Community pioneered this years ago. How are Friendster and Orkut different?

This entry was posted by 2000-2005 on Tuesday, February 3rd, 2004 at 12:02 pm. It is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.