Why Orkut Doesn’t Work

Before we could learn to pronounce it, it was shut down. It’s not that the servers are melting with the rapid rise to ~3 million page views or 500th most popular site in a couple of days. It’s not a conspiracy of data collection or a learning curve. orkut, which should really be named Oogle, demonstrated that a high performance explicit social networking site, well designed for digital immediate gratification (one local engineer personally even complained they had to click from map to profile to add a friend), supported by brand and with the right root can unleash latent demand. I would say this is reflective of the dearth of social capital in our society, but aside from such heady stuff, it was frictionless whuffie fun, huh? Latent demand for what is the question. Internet researchers would die excruciating deaths in search of the last days of data. I would venture a guess that most of the digerati that was already pre-conditioned by existing services, an incomprehensible demographic that grants hypergrowth to the best, grants the best feedback, but is easily taketh away. okurt doesn’t work because it lacks constraints. Nothing holds people back. Nobody knows what a friend means. No social capital on the line. Its so fun and easy, choices and incentives are irrational. Normally this would raise questions. Some constraints make good social compact. Some constraints on openness curb pollution (spam, security). One of the better constraints is price because it lead to profit. However, AdSense is relatively frictionless. It adds new constraints while adding value. Same could be said for other well targeted forms of content, like blog posts…