pondering the futility of social networks

[rone]

I'm >this< close to deleting my orkut account; that is, to requesting that it be deleted. I will set aside for a moment my opinion of social networks, and point out why orkut sucks as a service:

• There's no communication. There's no news page that tells you what Orkut is working on, what new features are coming, what bugs are being fixed, not even a fucking FAQ. This is key.
• The "communities" suck ass. There's no threading; if you leave, your posts become "anonymous"; only 10 entries are shown per page, and you can't change that.
• The random disappearance of accounts and communities lead many to believe that there's an active censorship vector. In itself, that's not a big deal, but because there's no established policy, and referring back to my first complaint, we can't KNOW what's going on because nobody's SAYING ANYTHING.
• orkut's First Law: You can't delete your own account. orkut's Second Law: Your account can be deleted at any time for any slight against orkut, real or imagined. Corollary via Murphy's Law: trying to diss orkut in order to get your account deleted will fail.

I used to defend orkut by saying it was a beta site. No longer; it might say "beta" on each page, but it's evident that development ceased weeks ago (probably as soon as Orkut's stupid launch party occurred). It's abandonware, folks, so do the appropriate thing: remove your personal info and abandon your account.

Comments

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

The "sheep mentality" thing is the two-edged sword for orkut; without it, it wouldn't be a 'household name'.

Most of the complaints about it also don't seem important to me. And the inability to delete your own account isn't per se a problem, but rather, in my view, a symptom of the inattention that is what i consider to be the biggest problem with orkut.

[kerri9494.livejournal.com]

As someone who develops web applications, I'm getting kind of depressed by the recent hoo-hah about Orkut sucking.

While on one hand I want to share my work with everyone, the other hand wants to cover my face and run away. I guess it's just a harsh reality that we'll never be able to make everyone happy.

If what we're told is true, Orkut is some guy's project. It's not a production app. It's a dev project.

I had someone come in and talk to me about his project today, and he was REALLY UPSET because there was no search interface for him to look at yet. Of course, we hadn't discussed what needed to be searched on (there's lots of XML-encoded metadata, plus full-text searching), and the engine to do the searching hasn't been built yet. He also won't be happy to hear that he probably won't have anything to look at until April, since I am working on four other projects right now. I am not even going to change a typo for two weeks, because I'm doing other things.

I'm glad that it's just this one guy ragging on me, though, and not the whole interwebnet.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

The thing is that he's already released it to tens of thousands of people, and even had himself a little "launch party". You can't have it both ways; if it's a development site, limit the amount of testers and follow up aggressively to feedback. If it's a production site, it should be up to snuff as far as reliability and features go. In this case, it's neither. Couple that with the "all your info are belong to us" 'privacy' policy and you gotta ask, what's in it for me?