Remember Friendster? Well, Orkut is a similar service created by a Google employee, and originally only offered membership to Google employees and their friends and their friends of friends and so on. With six degrees of separation and all, it’s no surprise that I was offered membership in a matter of months. I don’t really care about these services as an actual social networking tool. I think you have to put a lot of work into them to get any social value out of them, and I’d much rather not run my life from behind a computer screen. However, there’s really no limit to its amusement value. For instance, shortly after sifting through the Princeton University “community” to look for familiar faces, I stumbled upon the following profile:
I have no reason to believe it’s not real. You’ll have to log on to read the rest. (If you’re a friend, I’ll be happy to invite you.)
Interesting that high-profile people would have a profile on one of these things. Even if they are being written by a publicist. To me, Orkut inherited the connotations of a dating service from Friendster, and the effect is similar to running across a presidential candidate’s personal ad in the newspaper. Amusing.
Oh, how very far we’ve come.