Once again, I am letting the dishes (and the dustbunnes) pile up while I am exploring yet another new social network service, Orkut. This one is attracting a lot of attention because it is backed by people with deep pockets and major computer power: Google, which a few months ago had its offer to purchase Friendster rejected. You following all this? It's expected that Orkut will be a serious contender in this market, having watched carefully from the sidelines as Friendster and other social networking sites launched early, making various smart moves and smart-ass mistakes.
Aside: Orkut? They must be running out of names for new social software services. At least "friendster" tripped nicely off the tongue. And what exactly are we members of the Orkut network supposed to call ourselves? Orkutters? Orkutites? Orkultists? By the way, Orkut is supposed to be named after its creator, Google employee and former Stanford graduate Orkut Buyukkokten. Here's his home page.
At this point, Friendster is still growing at a phenomenal rate, and is closing in on the six-million member mark. However, the service seems to be staggering under the onslaught of new users, and a chorus of user complaints about Friendster being slow (or down completely) have led to migrations to other, competing services, notably myspace.com and tribe.net.
I just joined Orkut today (a big thank you to my fellow friendsters and bloggers Scott and Lynn and Sean for their assistance), and right now, I'm linked to 21,228 people through five friends (you see, you have to pick those first five friends very, very carefully LOL). Since the service has only 23,749 members at the moment, I've finally achieved a goal that was (and always will be) elusive in my friendster whoring frenzy: I'm connected to 89% of the members of a social software network. Woo-hoo! (*Ryan does the happy Friendster slut dance*)
And yes, I *know* it's not going to last; just let me revel a little, O.K.???
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