Dave Winer on Orkut
Dave Winer speculates on the nature of Orkut.
"Scott Rosenberg wonders what's the big deal with Orkut. Lots of people are wondering, me too. Like Scott, this is the first one I've joined, although I've been invited countless times to join Friendster, LinkedIn, etc etc. Like David Weinberger, I'm not impressed. It's a puzzle, why would Google bother with this? Well, first, it doesn't have to be very useful for Google to try it out. They've launched lots of speculative services that have failed to find users. This one is finding users. So what can they do with it? Easy. It's their identity system. At some point they'll add a web services interface so our comment systems can connect to their back-end to validate users. Now you can go to one place to see all your comments. Then it gets better. Give it your credit card info, and then when you go to an Orkut-enabled e-commerce site, you can have one-click ordering (modulo a certain patent). Think about all the relationships Google has with sites that run their ads. Even I run their ads on one of my sites, and it's a pretty good deal, that one site pays for the bandwidth on all my sites. Anyway, that's a ramble. The net-net -- it's Google's identity system, and if you trust them, it can be yours too."
Dave Winer on Orkut
MarkTAW on Google and Market Research
"...BlogDex, the website created at MIT which lists "the most contagious information currently spreading in the weblog community," and Popdex, " Popdex crawls over 14,000 sites daily to determine the most popular links on the Internet."
Popdex also includes a buzz archive of the most popular searches on Yahoo, and a list of rising words in weblogs. Throw in Google Zeitgeist, a list of the most popular searches on Google and you have the most powerful market research tool on the planet.
If I'm a major corporation or a politician, how long do I have to wait to get back market research on a product or speech? And how do you do it? Phone calls, focus groups, opinion polls at the local mall? Those could take days or weeks to complete.
Well no longer. Now you can get near instantaneous feedback online. Create a tool that searches the most popular weblogs and forums, the ones most important to what you're interested in, and you can know within minutes - moments if you add chat rooms - what people think."
MarkTAW: Google as Big Brother
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