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February 16, 2004
Orkut and Social Networking Websites
Having been members of Orkut for some weeks, it is a good time to analyze the phenomenon a bit more.
Social networking (dating?) websites will be on everybodys mouth (or keyboard) within the next few months, Part of the amazing expansion of the internet as a medium has been the ease of communication and the ability to talk and reveal things that under ordinary circumstances one wouldnt. Cyberspace seems a far more honest (and brutal, rudem unrestricted, anarchic, disorderly, left-hemisphere etc.) place than our every day world.
Orkut is simply an addition to the many communities that existed before but done in a totally integrated way (Orkut isnt the first to follow such an approach. Friendster.com and LinkedIn.com for example have been going on for some time). You now have the opportunity within the same website to talk about business, plan a meeting with fans of your favorite actor, meet and date people in your area etc. It is really a micro-internet under the same domain name.
Orkut is remarkable in its marketing approach to getting popular. Its totally viral way of getting more and more users induces an automatic expansion: You can a\only become a member only if another member invites you to join. In other words the fame of Orkut is populated by its own users since it is definitely to their advantage to get as many of their friends as possible in the community (so with the six-degrees-of-separation argument they can start to network with friends of friends of friends).
However, Orkut after about a month of service has yet to get a critical mass of participating members to call it a spectacular and lively place to be. And to make things worse a check of the Orkut terms and conditions reveals that By submitting, posting or displaying any Materials on or through the orkut.com service, you automatically grant to us a worldwide, non-exclusive, sublicenseable, transferable, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable right to copy, distribute, create derivative works of, publicly perform and display such Materials. Which sounds just like the Microsoft Passport terms that created an outrage a couple of years ago
Again, we must stress that we will hear a lot about similar social networking websites (as Lycos is entering the game as well). Orkut is bound to be one of the main players in the game as it is played in a smart way (and is also promoted by Google, the mother company). It is a matter of checking how all this is going to evolve.
Posted by Basileios at February 16, 2004 10:42 AM
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