Have been invited to Orkut a couple of days ago and decided to go for a ride. Since then I have been annoying my social environment with unexpected invitations.

Orkut is a relatively new service that has been acquired by Google recently. It is named after its inventor Orkut Buyukkokten and we can be happy he chose his first name instead of the last one. So what actually is Orkut? Here is what they say about themselves:

Orkut is an online community that connects people through a network of trusted friends. We are committed to providing an online meeting place where people can socialize, make new acquaintances and find others who share their interests.

I haven‘t tested any of the alternatives but so far Orkut is at least interesting. It seems to be in good use in the open source scene (and my social environment in particular) making my list of friends growing at a constant rate. In addition to defining „friend“ relationships one can declare oneself being a „fan“ of somebody as well. Maybe other relationships expressing other relations should be added. But on the other hand it‘s much too early for me to know what should be next.

What‘s pretty annoying is the apparent instability of the system. It seems as if it is unable to deal with the load at present. Regularly I get error messages of all kinds but usually the service returns within minutes. Well, Orkut still has the „beta“ tag so maybe I should not complain. Not acceptable is that the login procedure does not use encrypted http essentially offering your password to the net.

Other omissions:

• You can‘t state the languages you speak
• You can‘t enter your nickname in addition to your real name (some people are better known under their nicknames)

So much for now. Let‘s see how this works out after using it for a while