Aha.

[mattlistener]

A Yahoo employee's take on Orkut: Google Needs Users.

google's advertising model has emerged to be the least offensive to me of any that I can think of. I've even clicked on paid links simply because I was actually searching for that product or service at the time, and felt well-served by google as a result.

So if google helps keep itself afloat by data-mining orkut and using what it knows about me to pick more personally-tailored paid links, more power to'em.

Comments

[volta]

Not nagging, just wondering, as I have heard complaints that Orkut's invite system has a tendancy to fail: did you send me an invite?

Re:

[beowabbit]

I'd send you one, but either our net or my browser or orkut is doing something weird at the moment.

Re:

[volta]

*nod*

If you (or anyone else) does send an invite, please send it to volta@livejournal.com. Thanks.

Re:

[beowabbit]

Done. I listed you as Volta *, but I'm pretty sure you can change that. If you start getting junk mail addressed "Dear Mr. *", please let me know. :-)

Re:

[volta]

Ok, thanks. I will let you know if I ever get the invite.

Re:

[volta]

Just got both of your invites, and am now all signed up. Thanks.

Re:

[mattlistener.livejournal.com]

I did, when you first asked. I used your unh address. I've deleted that invite and sent you a new one using your lj address.

Re:

[volta]

Huh. I have not yet recieved either of those, nor have I recieved the one beowabbit sent. *checks spamtraps, not there either* I wonder if they are having scaling issues. I guess I will wait until tomorrow, and shoot them some mail if I have not recieved any of those invites by then.

[bitty.livejournal.com]

hmph. and queue caved today - man, does he ever work over there? *grin* - and no one uses friendster anymore :( so maybe, depending on the level of personal information they require, i could use it to get my 6degrees fix...

[laurens10.livejournal.com]

Hmm. I don't buy his argument.

As a main point of proof, he says:
If you've been thru the Orkut registration process, you know that it attempts to collect a ton of data about you.

It did ask for my age, my sex, and my relationship status, but mostly it was all about what books I liked and music I listened to... which I entered as input in free text fields. If they were planning on data mining, I would expect many more checkboxes and many more targeted questions that would be useful for marketing yet disguised as something else. I suppose they might want to data mine using preferences associated with zipcodes, but those types of data compilations already exist.

From what little I know about the development of Orkut, it makes perfect sense that this evolved from Google, not because of profit-making potential, but because of Google's corporate culture. I imagine a large part of how people chose search engines has to do with reputation as much as results. Orkut is a way to build reputation. What the author is suggesting would be a speedy way of losing it.