Well, it seems that Orkut is now sending out a newsletter to members.
Mine looks something like this:
Hey Jeremy, You have 162 friends: - 145 friends - 5 acquaintances - 12 haven't met New members in your network since May 16th: - 2 new friends - 33 new friends of friends - 2490 new friends of friends of friends Friends of friends you might be interested in meeting: - Joi Ito http://www.orkut.com/Profile.aspx?uid=1405190888294923508 - Ask Bjørn Hansen http://www.orkut.com/Profile.aspx?uid=5207100656550035736 - Mitchell Kapor http://www.orkut.com/Profile.aspx?uid=2200921687867140392 - Dick Hardt http://www.orkut.com/Profile.aspx?uid=2188320823389402654 - Matt Haughey http://www.orkut.com/Profile.aspx?uid=3575904372355169744 - Eron Jokipii http://www.orkut.com/Profile.aspx?uid=12708511918384084321 - Babs Gnos http://www.orkut.com/Profile.aspx?uid=13625024681802590492 - Jeneane Sessum http://www.orkut.com/Profile.aspx?uid=1079266015672442351 - Liz Lawley http://www.orkut.com/Profile.aspx?uid=17073484595075999541 - Cameo Wood http://www.orkut.com/Profile.aspx?uid=5395024727431731081 Recently updated friend albums: - Andrei Zmievski http://www.orkut.com/AlbumView.aspx?uid=17615365798898694637 - Jøn Stephens http://www.orkut.com/AlbumView.aspx?uid=5243968044137468252 You can receive a better personalized newsletter by adding friendship levels to your friends: - http://www.orkut.com/Friends.aspx stay beautiful, orkut.com team
Amusingly, Mail.app marked it as Junk Mail (or spam). Is this the first one they've sent? I really don't know. Maybe SpamAssassin nabbed the others.
Heh.
Posted by jzawodn at May 24, 2004 11:24 PM
I think I turned off everything in the options so I never receive any Orkut mail (except for those internal messages, which are 99% spam -- site advertising that is).
I got it too, 0.0 points from SpamAssassin.
Nothing matching 'orkut' in my spama folder so it seems this is the first one.
Strange, I do recall disabling -all- 'please send me your spam' flags...
Could somebody enlighten me, please? What's the point of Orkut? Even this newsletter seems like interesting numbers, nice stats, a little bit of graph analysis, etc., but I don't see the value of it. What am I missing, other than a few brain cells?
Hello, Jeremy!
I find it humourous that Orkut recommended you to me, but not the converse. I already knew everyone it recommended to me, and had intentionally not friended them from the beginning. I suppose they did an analysis of the popularity of other non-friended individuals among your friends, and suggested them to you.
I suppose that is useful, but there are other more refined tools with which to do so- mainly things like technorati and just looking at their blogs in general.
It is interesting how I was recommended to you, after one of the readers of your blog sent me your url after reading this entry. Oh the tangled web!
Nice to meet you!
-Cameo
Yup, very annoying. I had turned off all email communications from Orkut and they ignored that. Also they seem to invisibly re-send invites to people I am already connected to sometimes as well. I guess it is time to completely remove my account.
it's interesting that a couple on the list are other yahoo employees, seems like orkut think, if you friend a couple of them, you should friend them all
oddly, all of my recommended friends were friends of the same friend. i've got 65 friends; it's not like there weren't options.
i wanted to check my mail options, since i thought i disabled the 'send me spam' option also, but after i login, i am getting 'connection refused'. bah... it's a conspiracy.
Orkut is already a spam haven.. I honestly feel sorry for the folks who can't find those settings to turn it all off.
Orkut has, for me anyway, been nearly silent for the past couple of months. This feels like a very transparent attempt to reignite a service which has found itself in the doldrums. I got a mail as well.
I still find myself wondering, past the trading card craze, what orkut is good for if you're not looking for a date. Same could be said of the others, I imagine. Now, if I could have access to my data, could export it, play with it, build on it, let others build on it, maybe then some innovation would flourish...
Finally somebody who agrees about apparent uselessness of Orkut, other than for getting dates (and what a lame way to go about it - what healthy creature would look for a babe/guy on Orkut!?).
Despite this, Orkut is still going strong, somehow. Google has brought back 'hype surfing', so common 5, 6, 7, 8 years ago.
The first time I heard about Orkut was on the Feedster.com site.
I noticed that you need an "invite" to use Orkut... I'm curious to try it. I'd really appreciate if anyone could invite me into the system. IM me at "yesiliveinaustin" AIM/Yahoo
So far I've heard some criticism of the system: 1. it's not based on an open standard (not yet, but this seems to be in the works--probably connected to something like a Jabber ID) and 2. some people take offense to the idea of being "collected" like a trading card.
What you said about being quoted by newspapers... (sorry the topic was closed!)
The power of blogs is that you have control over your own content. Even if you get quoted somewhere else--you can always go back and edit your post, make changes, clarifications, etc. You own the domain==you have control. This is the clear advantage over "forum" systems where you are essentially at the mercy of the "moderator" and you lose all control of your content (ie: what you said).
On the other hand you can factor in that now the web is being independently archived (without permission) so you might even find content that was removed from your website months ago, linked somewhere (like in waybackmachine). How many archives are there? How often are we being archived? God knows. We may have just seen the beginning of the "Google cache". We can test technical trading formulas on old stock market data--the internet will be no different. BlogPulse is already on it--you can graph keywords over time--very slick--but still toylike compared to what is really possible.
Internet "PR" is definitely in its infancy.
New IT comes out before there's even time to fully R&D strategies for using the existing tech. It's literally a race now to keep up with all the relevant information--these "racers" (that also know how to direct implementation) are worth $$$ IMHO.
I'm kept pretty busy promoting my own projects, but I have plans to offer "PR" services. I could dish out new epidemic analyzer buzzwords all night long, and my connective branding secrets don't come free. I'd rather not give my best ideas away out in the open, but I'm always free to chat with on IM ("yesiliveinaustin" AIM/Yahoo).
Peace.
i want to increase the no. of friends in the my friends list,also want to increase the fan list, and want to add some colourfulicon
