Orkut 2.0
There's been much talk lately about Orkut, especially with the latest news of its untimely demise. Amidst all this discussion, however, some individuals have raised some interesting have been some interesting points about Orkut, and SNS in general.
Tom makes note:
Still have not had time to enter the world of Flickr, and rarely visit Orkut. One thing, though, about the Orkut type of social software is, it bears no resemblance to anything I conceive of as social.
I.e., simply on a very naive level, I do not tend to think of people I know as frozen in time, forever repeating the same tired information about books, movies, tv shows, and such.
Would it not be a tad more "life-like" to make, say, a blog or something of the sort the home page for these social network thingies?
Rebecca Blood does an excellent topology tour of the social model of Orkut and provides a list of insight into what could help to make it better. Her list includes:
- Change the user agreement
- Allow a graduated acquaintance scale
- Let anyone be a fan
- Stop promoting popularity contests
- Allow me to delete birthday reminders
- Give users something to do with "Friends of a Friends" besides spamming each other
- Add "Want" and "Have" categories to user profiles and find a way to search and match them among users
- Make all aspects of Orkut more configurable
- Allow users to designate more than one industry on their professional profile
- Prompt users to add keywords to Communities as they create them
- On my home page, show which of my Communities have been updated
- Improve your page-to-page navigation
- Make "My Network" useful
These thirteen changes alone won’t make Orkut the ultimate in social networking. But they will make the service more useful and give it a good base for further innovation. With its integrated personal, social, and business functions, Orkut has an opportunity to outstrip it competitors—but only if its creators make smart choices that support the genuine needs of real people.
danah boyd recently commented on a question she is often asked, "Which YASNS Is Best?":
There's an architectural lesson there... Environment matters because it draws the right people. This is why niche shit works. The biggest joke about the Internet is that the most profitable services are barely public. They address a niche market completely. One of the most unfortunate things about social software is that everyone is trying to court everyone to their service. Frankly, a far more appropriate response would be to try to figure out which users are most suited for your tool given its current state and then try to meet their needs completely. Figure out your audience. And don't simply focus on your desired audience because the tool you created may not have met their needs... be able to shift if you find that you've built something far more appropriate for another group. Cause frankly? If you have, the users know it and are using it more completely there.
I think the lesson to be learned from all of these examples is that flexibility cannot be sacrificed for indexability. Our SNS needs to mimic our lives more closely for it to be useful.