(no subject)

[prog]

Started to sweep out my inbox today, all ~3000 letters, dating back to this time last year. So I guess this is a naturally annual thing, with something about the end of the first month inspiring me to clean up in this way. The mail backlog consists of all the mail I didn't delete out-of-hand, or immediately after reading... that's a tiny minority of it. I started to make a textfile pulling out all the interesting links I found in them, but computer crashed after the first thousand, so none for you, alas. Maybe I'll be inspired to try again when I chew through the remaining hundredscore later this week.

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Less hyper about Orkut now than I was last night. As someone else put it, there's an urge to "get the high score", and make your friends number bigger and bigger. I ended up sending only one invitation email, into the heart of Arcus turf, which had the desired effect (netting me several points at once as several people joined and friended me). Traded obligatory links with a couple of alphageeks, as well as a bunch of locals who alredy had Orkut accounts, as I happened to stumble across them. More or less done with it for now, though I'm interested to see where this thing will go next.

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Volity: had our first online conference Saturday afternoon. Went brilliantly. (Summary is in the mailing list archives.) Going to do it every week, and make it a public event. For the record, it will be (until further notice) every Saturday at 1 p.m. Eastern, at devchat@conference.volity.org, which any good Jabber client should be able to take you to. Gotta update the website and such, yes...

Comments

[keimel.livejournal.com]

Orkut:
Is there a point to non-single people being in Orkut? I guess I'm thinking of that other friend's circle thing that came around about 6 months ago, where it seemed like it was only useful to people looking to 'hook up'. Being married, I'm not really interested in that.

I've received an invite (yes, your Arcus targeted bomb spread shrapnel all over) but ignored it, mostly out of ignorance as to its overall purpose.

*shrug*

ed-joo-muh-cate me! :)

Re:

[prog.livejournal.com]

Lots of people are asking the same question, and I certainly have no answer. A lot of the Greater ORA Crowd (from my POV) joined up all at once (regardless of their relationship status), I suspect because the "Friendster" model has been ringing vague "emerging technology" bells for a while, so when one appeared with the magic Google seal of approval, all these people rushed it. I admit that I was part of this movement (jjohn, whose invitation I accepted, is a former ORA orker).

It's kinda fun to browse through social networks; it's a lot more immediate than, say, reading your LJ friends' friends pages. But on another level, it's less interesting, or differently interesting, anyway. You see all these people flashing past, and a can get a rapid sense for how they're socially connected, but it's very different from reading them.

So I get the sense that there are lots of hackers who see potential for something there, besides a DIY dating service, but nobody's really sure what this is yet. There are some "Now what happens?" discussion groups on the site that I haven't looked at yet...

[jtroutman.livejournal.com]

yes.

It is interesting. A good place to find a lot of new blogs to look at. Also interesting to see the same folks that keep showing up again and again in the difference communities.

There are problems with the system, to be sure. Communities are pretty broken in terms of there being too many of them, and lots of duplication.

I think that eventually there will be just a giant blog/socialnet 'thing' and some open protocols for the data, and everyone will be able to find and link to everyone else.

I don't use the dating section of the site much, of course. The site seems a bit bi-polar about what the users are supposesd to do with it.

in all, it is more interesting than 6 degrees, which is the only other social networking site that I have any direct experience with.