Most: the pictures. There are people I know through blogs, #joiito, and other online settings. It’s nice to connect faces with names and personalities.
Least: reminders of old squabbles. The trouble with online communities is there are fewer opportunities to make up if you disagree. I wish that Orkut had a “send roses” feature.
The “send roses” feature is a great idea! You should suggest it. For the manly men who want to make up with other manly men, one should be able to substitute beer for the roses.
The “fans” and “crushes” features are sort of creepy, as is the feature to rate your friends. And they seem pretty meaningless — there’s no indication of a scale, and somehow it’s been decided that even *I* am very sexy, which strikes me as pretty unlikely. 🙂
Out of curiosity I did a search for women who want to date in Austin (yes, it was just curiosity) and found very few hits. My guess is that despite all the hoopla about the trustworthiness of foaf networks, few people — especially women — find orkut a good place to seek dating partners because there’s no way to be anonymous.
The biggest problem is all the friend-whoring to build your network. After I reluctantly accepted “friendship” from a couple of strangers (I’m just a boy who can’t say no) I read the fine print and it seems that denying a request for friendship gets you quietly dropped from the proposer’s friends list, rather than happening with a flourish of trumpets and an e-mail announcement that “You got snubbed!” If I’d understood that I’d have been more likely to turn them down.
Finally, let us not forget the handy guide to interpreting social network photos: http://www.buttafly.com/originals/friendster2.php
Adina, even better: you could make the roses thing work as a positive or negative comment:
Send roses to [member].
Select one:
[ ] Live roses [ ] Dead roses
[Submit]
This is one way foafster will be better. Your FOAF file simply asserts who you consider a friend. Others may use FOAF-spidering tools that show “these people consider me a friend” and may be prompted “oh yeah, of course I should put him in my FOAF file” but nobody actively needs to approach anybody else.
What I like least about Orkut is that it exists. Do we really need YASNS?