Orkutlery

I’m on Orkut as of today. I don’t need to link to it, and I refuse to not capitalize its “O.” I’ll send you an invite if you want to dick around on yet another social networking site. With so many people talking about it I had to have a look.

Orkut is faster and simpler than Tribe, but doesn’t do everything Tribe can do, for better or worse. In my experience, the Tribe approach of offering interfaces to all potential uses of the network (cataloging friends, finding friends, dating, finding work, finding business peers, selling stuff, asking questions, talking) means that it does a little bit of everything but does nothing well. Having specialized networks (Fuckster for fucking, LinkedIn for getting a job so you can pay for dinner before fucking people you met on Fuckster) seems like a more effective approach, but nobody wants to juggle multiple social address books. Orkut tries to manage everything from friends to business to dating, and it does a so-so job at it all.

Orkut seems to be attracting a slightly geekier crowd than Tribe, almost certainly due to the cache of the service’s Google associations. Just about everyone I want to be associated with on Tribe is there and then some. Were I to choose between Tribe and Orkut, I would choose Orkut for the higher quality of people, the two services’ other features, merits, and failings all being about even. I would miss Tribe’s heads-up display of interest groups with active discussions, which has no equivalent I’ve yet seen in Orkut. Other odd Orkut interface decisions, such as lacking alphabetization in its listings, could be irking if they don’t get ironed out. Despite them, however, I quickly managed to find and add a bunch of friends, join some 60 communities (mostly geek stuff) with just one click apiece, and otherwise make my around the service without confusion.

If you only had one social networking site to join today, join Orkut. But for reasons I won’t go in to here (again, and because other people have it covered), it’s really not worth the time.