procrastination diagram

Gosh, once again I have no idea where the week went. Maybe I should explicitly devote today to writing code to make posting as frictionless as possible for me. Fiddling with the comment system could also be interesting, although I think that implementing trackback might be a bad idea. Anyway, Orkut.

Orkut is another useless piece of social software, but this time "in affiliation with Google" and much slicker than, say, Friendster. It's having some teething problems, but it hasn't started to slow down yet, and is much more fun to click around in. I can't really explain why, but I think that it's the best UI for an application in a browser that I've ever encountered. It differentiates itself from Friendster by trying to be both for business and pleasure, and having communities and forums. One gets the feeling that they could add some actually useful functionality any day now. If anyone who bothers to read this wants an invitation and hasn't gotten one yet, let me know.

I thought I'd read this comment around here, but I don't find it in either threads where you mention orkut. Something about "orkut communities could become the next usenet". I'm not sure why it's feeling more applicable than livejournal -- but I wonder if it has to do with the original exclusivity of the site, (presumably) starting with google geeks and moving outward from there (but still (presumably) tending towards more of the "geek crowd" than the "teenybopper high schooler crowd"). The format/layout of communities is a little more conducive to usenetability than LJ ones, too; you get to a profile page where you can easily see what threads are available and which ones have recently been updated, rather than a blog whose older entries fall off the page. (Though, I wish it would keep track of which of my communities have messages that are new-to-me. Or, at the least, sort my communities in order of "which ones have newest entries".)

Of course, it won't work unless people *use* it. I *want* a new usenet that I can use to talk to people until it gets lame because the forums are filled with fucktards (betting pool, anyone? I guess 6 months) -- I did my part by posting a (hopefully informative) new message/response in five different communities today. :)

I do also like the idea of "getting to meet new people" via these communities - instead of in usenet, where you had an poster's email address that you could hope to successfully altavista, you can directly click on the poster's profile and find out about them.

(It's kind of strange - I used to be fairly certain that I preferred mailing lists to the newsgroup model, but I'm suddenly all psyched for newsgroups now. Probably because they're less maintenance, and give you something to do when you're idling online?)

.. Actually, I'm not sure why Yahoo! Groups doesn't do it for me, either. Hmm. Maybe because this one's so budding that I feel more comfortable posting?