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January 24, 2004
Orkut: Brief notes
Posted by Clay Shirky
So
Orkut seems to be exploding -- people are joining at a rapid rate, albeit from a still-tiny base (my 40 friends link me to 6500 or so people, whereas on Friendster, 15 friends link me to 300,000+.) Their "you gotta be invited to get in" thing seems to be creating just the right sense of 'red velvet rope' to drive traffic, and the fact that it's Google-sponsored can't be bad for business.
They've also made it incredibly easy to declare a link to someone already in the system, meaning that even as more users are joining, average path length is falling. It was 4.4 a few hours ago, and its down to 3.8 now.
Another interesting detail: they let you do link-by-link path traversal, as in "Show me Liz's friends, let me select one, then show me Liz's friend's friends" and so on. I was wondering how deep they'd let me go (4, 5, or 6 degrees, basically), but they recalculate paths dynamically, so everytime I'd get a path like Clay->Liz->Sam and click on one of Sam's friends, it would recalculate to soemthing like Clay->Greg->Sam's Friend.
I finally walked off the end of a 5 link traversal, and started just seeing random people with no link calculation (which feels like a violation of the premise of FOAF networks -- "Only let me see and be seen by people who are within N degrees"), but it took some time. The nework *feels* much denser than Friendster or LinkedIn, which is to say fewer people with single digit connectivity, but I don't have a global view, so I can't yet say for sure.
There is an _incredible_ amount of activity around adding friends on the system right now; my mailbox is mostly Orkut notifications. I wonder if all social services will suffer from the difference between the dollhouse pleasures of setting things up ("ooh, and I know _this_ person and _this_ person and _this_ person...") and the rarity of actual use. I have gotten far more requests to link on LinkedIn, for example, than actual requests for use (user since launch, 54 connections, 3 total requests for actually use for the service.)
Comments (7)
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1. Stewart Butterfield on January 24, 2004 11:55 PM writes...
My guess is that it will slow down soon. People who care about this stuff and were waiting to see what Google would do all signed up in the first 48 hours.
I'd be surprised if another service which is essentially the same as Friendster (but comes off as 1,000 times dorkier) would, say, spread through the Philippines again.
Permalink to Comment2. Scott Rafer on January 25, 2004 3:29 AM writes...
Dorkier, yes. Essentially, the same as Friendster, no. Run carefully through the feature set and data collection. Starting with Google Mail, Orkut is the Trojan Horse by which Google becomes a broad portal. Orkut will mean a few hundred million in extra revenue for Google AdWords/AdSense over the next 12 months. Over the past few days, Orkut has entered the top 500 sites on the 'Net. In the unlikely event that it levels off there, so what?
Permalink to Comment3. Stewart Butterfield on January 25, 2004 6:06 AM writes...
Point taken (sideways). Yes, if they do a ton of other things, it will be huge. Google has the power to make pretty much any(useful)thing huge. I was just talking about Orkut, as an invite only site, with that horrible picture on the front page and the "expand the circumference" tagline.
If Google decides to go with it (fixing it up, recoding it, using the rest of their network as a distribution channel) then it might be really big.
But I've been thinking about how big Google's socnet thing could be for months now, and the current incarnation is not it. If this was not from Google there is no chance I'd sign up for it and I suspect that is true for the vast majority of the first 10,000-20,000. (I hope someone is keeping a chart of daily growth somewhere: I'll do even odds that day 4 sees fewer new members than day 2 did.)
(Also - few hundred million? That'd be grabbing 5% of the total market for all categories of onine advertising. Ambitious ...)
(Also, 500th? Says who? Alexa says they are 129,813th.)
Also: you're the third person I've seen who's mentioned Google Mail - how do you get to that on the site? I've been lookling around for it but don't see it.
Permalink to Comment4. Ross Mayfield on January 25, 2004 9:03 AM writes...
Should be the densest graph because it has the lowest transaction cost for finding and making connections. That and its darn fast.
Their Messages are broken, allowing an unconnected node to broadcast to the entire network. Check the spam you have already received. So the only communication going on is in Community boards and backchannels, right now its a Friend game.
BTW, did create a Social Software Community.
Permalink to Comment5. Tim Keller on January 25, 2004 9:57 AM writes...
It's all cutesy features for people to play with, nothing that I'd settle down & use. How many pages was the profile questionnaire? 5? 6? It's all very self conscious, not unobtrusively useful like a well-designed tool should be. And on top of that there's a host of security problems, from spam to XSS to mining profile data you've set to private. I'll stick with Tribe.
Tim
Permalink to Comment6. john on May 25, 2004 10:24 PM writes...
Orkut- can someone invite me
Permalink to Comment7. Steve on June 10, 2004 6:19 AM writes...
I wasnt invited by anyone. God im so disappointed in my lousy friends. Just because i wasnt already a member everyone thinks im not interested. Man i need to move to a new country and start over. Could someone send me invite a_mal3@hotmail.com I have some revenge to take kill bill style
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