On-line friend
networks such as Friendster and Friend-of-a-friend have fallen somewhat out of grace. Orkut however is different.
It is soaring: less than a month after it was launched (on January 23), Orkut can boast almost 100.000 members and it seems to be discussed everywhere, both on the net and In Real Life.
The idea behind such friends''
networks is simple. After joining, you describe your interests and particularities such as age, sex and relational status, you make a list of your friends and invite them, and thus you map your social networks onto Friendster or Orkut. After registering you can take a look at the friends of your friends or investigate who else shares your interests. You can invite the new people that you find in this way to become part of your own network and thus create new ties.
That''s basically it. It''s all a tad trite, basically a great way of doing away with your time, although admittedly it must be fun to suddenly find an old friend in this way.
But indeed: Orkut is different. Unlike Friendster or Friend-of-a-friend, it is incredibly hip, and it is especially popular especially amongst the
internet savvy. Orkut''s close ties to Google, the internet''s best search engine (Orkut was developed by a Google employee during company hours), may have greatly promoted Orkut''s cool factor: Google doesn''t often affiliate itself with a new toy, so that if it does, it must mean something. Such spill-over of good-will works.
Even when Orkut is different.
All more or less formalised on-line networks depend on databases. Friendster puts your profile together with that of all other Friendsters in a huge file and thus preserves everything that you were willing to spill about yourself: who your friends are, whether you smoke, your favourite films and bands, your political preferences. The sheer amount of private data that is being preserved makes such databases rather sensitive, even though the participants have entered those data themselves. People usually do not mind telling their friends that they have experimented with drugs, but when their mother or boss makes an appearance on that same network, the situation somehow changes.
Basically, it is everybody''s own responsibility to assess how much they want to disclose. Generally, it isn''t very smart to put things on-line which you do not want to be retrievable until kingdom come, be it in a usenet posting on your own web site or in Friendster or Orkut. Anybody participating on the net should be aware that the internet''s collected memory lasts a tad longer than an analogue conversation. On the net, everything is archived and usenet postings and web pages are kept for eternity.