Writer Warren Ellis (it's funny; if you've only done a blog, you'll not likely see "Writer, ...... [your name]" as your introduction. Do a bunch of hip comic books, though, and you're a writer; discuss) takes a shot at Orkut, the social networking system in the works from a Google alum.
A friend of mine invited me into Orkut this weekend, and I played around with it for a day before it was taken offline. Like Ellis, I'm still trying to understand the overall point of social networking hubs.
It's faster than Fuckster and Tribe, but it shows that all these friend-of-a-friend things have really hit a wall. I mean, what can you actually do aside from invite all your friends and piss about on a couple of small message boards? Message boards that, unlike Tribe, allow anonymous postings and therefore devalue the message board experience? What happens after that? After you've gotten all your friends in -- whom you send email to or IM regularly in any case, presumably. That's it. All done. Until, I guess, yet another social network system opens and you start all over again.
I agree that the linking of IM to the social network would be beneficial, insofar that I think IM could ever be beneficial (in truth, I tolerate the existence of IM, at best). I really think the best way to make a social network useful it to tie it to an ebay-like bartering system. The social network is your means by which trust can be established. The bartering system - particularly for professional services - is the means by which the network becomes useful.
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