Gone East

hanging out at orkut.com

Last night I signed up for the new social networking site Orkut.com. There seem to be alot of people joining.

I managed to make contact with a handful of friends, some current, and some who I haven't heard from in a long time. It is interesting to look through all the "communities" and see who has signed up, and also to see who other people's "friends" are. But the real test will be whether Orkut provides comfortable and useful ways for new and old friends to interact within the service. Right now this is in pretty short supply.

The messaging and forums tools are fall far short of the standards for features and usability that we get now from other everyday tools, like email, forums, IM and irc.

I'm willing to cut them some slack though, and see what develops. They say clearly that this is still "beta" so let's see where they go.

If any of the team read this let me say that overall the user interface, although very attractive, is very awkward to use. It is extrememly "mode-y". Different commands are only accessible from specific screens that can be very confusing to find your way back to. And things are very sparsely labelled.

And this firstname thing they have. I bet they're trying to feel friendly, but hey, I know more than one "Brian" so telling me a message is from "Brian" is not very much use. And right now I have to click on Brian's name and open his profile to see which one I'm hearing from.

Anyway, keep working. A very large crowd of interesting people have arrived. I'm hoping we can find some fun stuff to play with.

Posted by jghiii at January 25, 2004 12:02 PM