David’s fine apologia for fuzziness in friendship, along with Dorothea’s observation that, yes, I ratcheted up her “hearts” quotient, reminds me of how I share their skepticism about the whole “ratings” endeavor on Orkut.
But let’s remember, this project has backing from Google. And Google attained its present search-engine pre-eminence through. . . . tracking and measuring real connections among websites.
My uninformed guess is that the present flaky rating program will turn out only to have provided a rough seeding base, and that Orkut turns out to have in reserve a Pagerank-like algorithm for measuring the online association between people, so that instead of crude characterizations such as smileys and ice cubes, and even hearts, we’ll see some characterizations based on measurable linking/citing behavior. That will, in turn, have weaknesses of its own, but it’ll be a great deal more interesting and less trivial.
But Dorothea, I still think that’s a sexy pika. And as long as I’m (improbably) sexy, you can share my looking-glass fate. (Actually, I just re-checked for the first time in a long time, and I’m now officially more trustworthy than I am sexy — a fluctuation that itself signals the absurdity of the whole endeavor.)
I did the “rate your friends” process once or twice when I first joined, but it felt creepy at the time, and I haven’t “rated” or “fanned” anyone since. I do admire a number of people, but (a) Safari doesn’t play nicely with Orkut’s rating icons, so I don’t see whom I’ve rated from visit to visit, which means either rating a number of people over and over because I don’t remember whether I got ’em last time or skipping the whole deal, and (b) I have deeply ingrained resistance to an exercise so artificial and personal (did I “fan” Jeneane? Now I have to go look. No, I didn’t. Now I have to go back to my page and click that I’m her fan. But what about the next person whom I neglected? And so on.) So I just flat-out stopped; if I haven’t said I’m your fan, please chalk it up to click exhaustion. David says, “all maintenance and no value”; I’d moderate that too “too much maintenance and not enough value.”
But I’m still curious to see what happens when Google’s Googliness kicks in.
Posted by AKMA at February 3, 2004 07:37 AM | TrackBackHey hey HEY there -- hands off the pika! Off, I said!
Sheesh. Weird tastes. What's Margaret going to say to you?
Posted by: Dorothea Salo at February 3, 2004 10:47 AM*snicker* Glad to see I'm not the only person who's allergic to "rating" others. If I didn't think my "friends" were trustworthy, I wouldn't've let them see my email address, right? *shrug* But, Dorothea, that _is_ an awfully cute... uh, is it a rodent?
Also, I'm still trying to figure out an icon that fits into Orkut's (awfully restrictive) guidelines without being my face. LiveJournal deals with this issue a lot better, IMO -- but I need to blog about that myself.
Posted by: Naomi Chana at February 3, 2004 03:51 PMI agree that the ratings are nonsensical, but I went the other way and clicked on everything for everyone. Not sure why; just to be perverse I suppose. My own rating has gone from hearts only (wth?) to a bit of everything but primarily cool. It's definitely arbitrary. I can't remember the author now (something tells me it was Tom Robbins) who said something about astrology being an entirely arbitrary set of rules, and the more rules there are, and the more arbitrary the rules, it produces a glimpse of a bigger pattern, like using a pencil to see what's been written on the previous page of a notepad. So perhaps it'll be like that.
Posted by: ARJ at February 3, 2004 05:05 PMA rodent it is indeed. I saw 'em in the Grand Teton mountains. They are quite cute.
Posted by: Dorothea Salo at February 7, 2004 07:12 AM