So many social networks, so little time...

In a spurt of procrastination, I joined Orkut, Google's spin on Friendster. Google's Orkut Buyukkokten started it as a personal project. (How cool is that? Google actually expects everyone to spend one day a week working on their own little interesting projects... and now the man has a whole website named after him.) A little sleuthing reveals this is in fact the same Orkut who was behind ClubNexus and inCircle. Suddenly this becomes a lot more interesting, like the epic struggle for this man having seen Friendster take his idea and screw it up...

Too soon to tell if this will catch on; if you're interested let me know and I'll invite you. Yes, it's that exclusive. It seems like an interesting improvements on Friendster, but they still haven't nailed navigating the social network yet. Hopefully our senior project will address this better...

Idle browsing (I call it "research for senior project") turned up Ortuk's original paper on the subject, which reported some interesting results from analyzing Stanford students' profiles:

- 62% of product design majors consider themselves "creative"
- 59% of philosophy majors think they're "intelligent"
- 55% of English majors like to read in their free time
- People who consider themselves "sexy" like books on sex and hot tubbing
- Men are more likely to enjoy sci fi movies
- Women are much more likely to prefer romances
- People who like gay/lesbian books or movies cluster together
- People who like gospel music cluster together
- Raving, ballroom dancing, and Latin dancing are also their own tight commmunities
- "Sexy" people hang out together
- So do people who spend their free time "fulfilling commitments"

I can't say this is entirely surprising... but interesting...