What Could Make Orkut More Powerful
is some way to visualize my social network and the social networks of my “friends.” I have a feeling I probably know more people on Orkut than I can find. The search mechanisms facilitate known-item searching (searching for a specific person by name is an example of known-item searching), but it isn’t very serendipity friendly. What I would find useful is for it to analyze different networks and make recommendations to me, like “Three of your friends connect to Jay. Jay is not on your friends list.” Then I can decide whether Jay is someone I want to add to my network. Maybe he’s someone I know, but I just don’t know he’s on Orkut. So far, my Orkut friends are all people I have met at some point in my life. Since some of us spin in similar circles in real life, some of us connect to the same people, creating very connected webs. I’ve found many of the people on my list by looking through my friends’ lists of friends and finding people I know. Maybe some people have time to look for everyone they know by name or interest, but I do not.
The way they currently organize the diagram of the network is by who most recently logged into the system. That is not very useful to me.
