As the attentive (or at least, the quick) amongst you will have worked-out by now, I have signed onto [www.orkut.com] – which, it seems – is some sort of Google-backed social networking tool.

Now I tend to hold these sorts of tools in mild suspicion; I’d already received two, perhaps three invitations to join Orkut from a variety of people – invites from some beloved friends, and invites from, er, others – however this invitation could not be ignored for it was sent by Valerie [www.bubb.org] who is of course the Goddess of Sunscreen and cannot be denied.[1]

So I signed up (id = alecmuffett, no if i have never met you i am unlikely to list you as my friend, i am slightly conservative about such things) and filled out a halfway accurate profile, not much more than could be intuited by regular blog readers.

A colleague pickedd me up about this sort of thing – that people will give away information in such fora that they will bitch about the Government having – but in this specific instance I don’t mind. It is a side effect of living your life in public. If there is stuff I don’t want people to know, I won’t tell anyone about it.

Simple.

Anyway, Orkut: yep, I found a lot of my old drinking buddies, fellow hackers, geeks, and some normal people on the list – and Peter Gutmann too! Cited a bunch of them as friends and got lots of e-mails acknowleding their reciprocity.

…and now, erm, what precisely?

I shall join a few of the communities, maybe one or two of them might even be within a hundred mile radius. It’d be interesting to try and superimpose other social structures/graphs on top of Orkut – but more of that anon.

I suppose I am waiting for the other functionality-shoe to drop.

—
[1] I am like, soooooooooo dead.[2]
[2]

our lady of sunscreen,
protect us from fragmentation,
deliver us from spoofing,
and deny us not our services.
for thine are the switches,
the packets and their headers,
’til time_t overfloweth,
amen.[3]

[3] might as well give her reason to kill me, go out with a bang.[4]
[4] damn this is jolly good beer.