Cliquester
Like a lot of other people, I’ve recently found myself simultaneously intrigued and repulsed by the brave new world of “social software.” On one hand, browsing my Orkut network holds an odd fascination: it’s like checking out the people at a party (except that at this party all of said people are frozen in museum display cases), and it’s certainly emotionally satisfying to receive an email saying that someone has designated me their friend. On the other hand, these friend-of-a-friend sites (and the invitation-only Orkut in particular) often seem less like forums for fluid networking than a way of modeling and reinforcing high school-style cliques, which I think everyone would agree are among the less desirable features of human social interaction (perhaps the social software entrepreneurs of the world should hire the author of Queen Bees and Wannabes as a consultant).
I think a lot of what makes me queasy about sites like Friendster, Tribe.net, and Orkut is that they’re fundamentally shallow in their notion of “friendship.” As Adam Kalsey points out, friends on social networking sites are not made, but collected. Beyond that, they don’t seem to have much of a purpose. This is especially true of Friendster, but it also applies to Tribe and Orkut, whose attempts at community seem a bit tacked on and underutilized to me.
This is not to say that I’ve written the idea of social software off entirely, though. I’ve recently become quite fond of del.icio.us, a bookmark site that allows you see what others have been bookmarking as well as which of your own bookmarks have been bookmared by others (I’m ldandersen). I’m a big Wiki fan. And I’m still of the opinion that weblogs, with their unique ability to let you in on slices of other peoples’ lives (see Tom Coates’ “Snow in Norfolk” post for one of my favorite recent examples of this), are the deepest, most effective form of social software yet devised.
To sum up, I believe social software has a future, but I’m definitely not convinced that Orkut and its ilk are anything more than a fad.
(Update: Jonas Luster’s del.icio.us bookmarks pointed me to auctions of Orkut invitations on eBay, a development that I find nearly as crushingly depressing as the advent of imaginary girlfriend auctions.)