Well, I've learned a little bit more about this Orkut thing since I last posted. It's kind of interesting. Apparently Google is a rather progressive company and they allow all of their employees to spend 20% of their time working on personal projects. One of their engineers, named Orkut, wrote a piece of 'social networking' software on his own time.
Google went ahead and put it out there for the heck of it. It's in 'beta' now, and will eventually likely be either advertising based or have a premium service. Either model seems reasonable to me. I've been using blogger for almost a year and half now and have never paid a penny for this fantastic service. We all use Google constantly and don't pay for that either.
Apparently, before Orkut, there was a product called "Friendster" which I was lucky enough to have never heard of. Apparently Friendster has a lot of critics. Orkut is supposedly much better, it's certainly quite fast and easy to use. It seems very, very, thin at the moment. There isn't a whole lot too it, but what it does do it does fairly well.
There's a gimmick to Orkut. You cannot join Orkut. You must be invited. When Orkut began it had exactly one subscriber. Orkut himself, the engineer who wrote the software. He then invited some friends to join. And they invited their friends, and so on and so on. After just a few weeks there are now 137,000 people in the Orkut community and it's growing probably 10,000 people a day or so.
What is Orkut? It's just a way to keep track of your friends. It's like your contact list online. It's all hyperlinked together so not only do you see your friends, but you see your friends friends, and so on and so on. Your contact information is private, only people you allow have access to it. However your personality profile, if you choose to fill it out, is available to all.
There are forums where you can have discussions and such, and that's pretty much all there is to it. There are some people who get paranoid about putting their personal information on a website like Orkut. But I don't see it as an issue. There is no information about me on Orkut that is not already public knowledge. My phone number is listed in the directory and anything else there can readily be found on this website. Simply type my name into Google and you will find out plenty about me.
In a short period of time with Orkut I have found a bunch of old, real friends, I had lost contact with. A bunch of industry people have hopped on board, so there are many game developers I know, or used to know from back in the 'old days'.
If you haven't checked it out, I encourage you to give it a try. If you haven't received an invitation yet, let me know and I'll send you the invite to this 'exclusive' club of 150,000 people.
Google went ahead and put it out there for the heck of it. It's in 'beta' now, and will eventually likely be either advertising based or have a premium service. Either model seems reasonable to me. I've been using blogger for almost a year and half now and have never paid a penny for this fantastic service. We all use Google constantly and don't pay for that either.
Apparently, before Orkut, there was a product called "Friendster" which I was lucky enough to have never heard of. Apparently Friendster has a lot of critics. Orkut is supposedly much better, it's certainly quite fast and easy to use. It seems very, very, thin at the moment. There isn't a whole lot too it, but what it does do it does fairly well.
There's a gimmick to Orkut. You cannot join Orkut. You must be invited. When Orkut began it had exactly one subscriber. Orkut himself, the engineer who wrote the software. He then invited some friends to join. And they invited their friends, and so on and so on. After just a few weeks there are now 137,000 people in the Orkut community and it's growing probably 10,000 people a day or so.
What is Orkut? It's just a way to keep track of your friends. It's like your contact list online. It's all hyperlinked together so not only do you see your friends, but you see your friends friends, and so on and so on. Your contact information is private, only people you allow have access to it. However your personality profile, if you choose to fill it out, is available to all.
There are forums where you can have discussions and such, and that's pretty much all there is to it. There are some people who get paranoid about putting their personal information on a website like Orkut. But I don't see it as an issue. There is no information about me on Orkut that is not already public knowledge. My phone number is listed in the directory and anything else there can readily be found on this website. Simply type my name into Google and you will find out plenty about me.
In a short period of time with Orkut I have found a bunch of old, real friends, I had lost contact with. A bunch of industry people have hopped on board, so there are many game developers I know, or used to know from back in the 'old days'.
If you haven't checked it out, I encourage you to give it a try. If you haven't received an invitation yet, let me know and I'll send you the invite to this 'exclusive' club of 150,000 people.
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