So, I signed up for Orkut the other day and I’ve spent a bit of time tooling around the system.
First, it’s an interesting concept — though not unique. Basically, you sign up through an invitation and then you can join various “communities” and link up with people you know, and attempt to link up with people they know or that you meet in one of the communities.
I’m not entirely convinced that this is wholly useful, though it may be entertaining. I see a lot of folks I know through the Linux community on the service, and something that enables me to keep in touch with folks I haven’t seen in a few years would be a Good Thing… but email would do just as nicely, if I were able to keep up with email.
The Terms of Service have been described as a bit onerous… since Orkut is in a development stage, though, I expect that they will change shortly. I also tend to have a bit more trust in Google than other corporations… they’ve been a pretty decent company so far, so I’m willing to give them a bit more rope than other companies. Plus, I didn’t give Google any data that isn’t already available, and I’m not posting any content on the site that I wouldn’t post on someone’s blog or whatever.
I dunno… it will be interesting to see how the site grows and whether Google adds any features that make it really useful.
