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February 19, 2004

Orkut, or Cut?

I had my Orkut profile deleted yesterday. I'd played with the system for a few weeks, accumulated nearly 100 "friends," many of whom asked me to be part of their network not vice versa. But, still, I was uncomfortable with the kinds of behavior and choices I had to make to be part of the network.

I was in some ways too rapidly connected with too many early adopters. I was part of a network of 60,000 people by the time I quit, and I'm guessing that means I was connected to every Orkut member. There are folks who talk more sensibly about why Orkut (and social networks in general) are problematic, like danah boyd's (EtCon talk), Chuq v. R., and Xeni Jardin.

But the fundamental problems for me are: I'm not dating. I'm married, happy, and not looking for more/new partners. And although I'm not a prude nor conservatively moraled, I still don't want to know the romantic social predilections like a Elks Club badge of everyone I barely know.

I'm not looking for more friends. I have enough friends in the atomic world already to want electronic friends that I will rarely if ever meet in fleshspace. I'd rather spend more time enriching existing friendships.

I don't need to spend more time online. It's already my work and my hobby.

It's easy to offend people. "You're not my friend, you're somebody I met and respect." Explicit choices lead to offense. Dividing it finer provides more opportunities to offend people at a more sophisticated level. How many relationships are perfectly symmetrical? How many do you want to put to the test of that symmetricality?

Although it's nice to hook up new business relationships online, I find LinkedIn accomplishes that enormously better with their focus on career and knowledge and endorsement. It's still a social networking system, but it appears to be more like a resume connector than a friend-maker.

I don't need to expose myself through yet another method. My site already exposes me enough. Even if I limit my profile, I'm providing a lot of personal detail. If I don't fill out the profile, I'm not very interesting.

Finally, how many Orkut, Friendster, etc., will there be in which I have to fill out the same information again and again?

Posted by Glennf at February 19, 2004 8:44 AM

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� Glenn on Orkut from Teal Sunglasses
Interesting piece by Glenn Fleishman on why he quit Orkut. Makes some points similar to the issues I had. But I just had another thought as well. Has Google figured out a way to have us do the beta testing and system architecture for them? Are we coll... [Read More]

Tracked on February 19, 2004 9:36 AM

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