Guardian: "Social networking sites are spreading like a rash through the internet, but are they sustainable."

"In the beginning, way back in 1996, it was SixDegrees. Last year, it was Friendster. Last week, it was Orkut. Next week, it could be Flickr. All these websites, and dozens more, are designed to build networks of friends, and they are currently at the forefront of the trendiest internet development: social networking. But unless they can start to offer more substantial benefits, it is hard to see them all surviving, once the Friend Of A Friend (Foaf) standard becomes a normal part of life on the net."

Orkut - named after its creator, Orkut Buyukkokten - is the hot site of the moment. Buyukkokten, a computer science doctoral candidate at Stanford University before joining Google, created Orkut.com in the past several months by working on it about one day a week--an amount that Google asks all of its engineers to devote to personal projects. [CNET] Because Friendster-style software is easy to produce, Orkut's biggest advantage is its close association with Google. This has helped it attract the "alpha geek" bloggers and commentators on social software. But being new is an advantage in itself. Join a new service and there are lots of things to do, such as tracking down friends and entering your lists of favourite movies, and so on. Perhaps not until the initial activity has died down, in a few months, will many users start to wonder if there are any practical benefits.

The idea of creating a machine readable data format (a vcard type of thing) is fabulous. Imagine having a web address -say, profiles.friendster.com/unique_name.xml - where everyone can pull up your information and you (and only you) can edit your information through an interface. That's what makes all the social networking sites one - and makes the largest of that kind.

Orkut's interface is unique, and much faster than friendster. What makes is so different from friendster is the fact that it's a closed invitation-only system. It's all started in the bay area, so the chances are high you ran into many random people who you know.

What kind of social software are you?