Much of the buzz this past week that I utterly and completely ignored has been about Orkut, Google’s entry into the social networking trend. As with the rest, you sign up, invite friends, link to other friends, and so on. I’ve never been too hot about these things — they seem kind of silly, reducing friendships and acquaintances to the level of Pokemon characters (collect the whole set!).

Still, I’m not entirely averse to giving it shot, especially when I get two invitations to join on one day (from both Mike and Jonas), so I figured I’d at least sign up and poke around for a bit (if you’re on Orkut, here’s my profile). I signed up, filled out a good chunk of the profile information, joined a few communities, and added a few friends. Amusingly enough, of the four friends I have listed, I’ve met exactly one of them in the real world (Jon, who interviewed me for the MSNBC story about the Microsoft fracas), which is one of the reasons I’ve always been amused by these types of websites — just what, exactly, is the criteria for “friend”? Myself, I’d kind of like it if there were levels or categories of friends (online friends, real life friends, close friends, acquaintances, friends I’d jump in bed with if given half a chance, etc.), but that’s something I’ve yet to see in one of these.

At the moment, with four friends listed, I’m connected in some way to 5,298 people. I have no idea what that means, really (how far do these connections go? Two degrees? Six? Twelve? Infinite?), but that’s what it tells me.

I experimented a bit with the communities feature by creating one for TypePad users. Amusingly enough, after a run to the bank to get my account back in the black, when I got home I found that there were now two more members for that community — none other than Ben and Mena. Rather nifty, that.

Now, of course, the question becomes whether or not I’ll ever remember to check in on this whole thing. I was invited into and signed up for Friendster a while back, and as yet, I believe I’ve checked up on my account there all of four or five times. Now, of course, I can’t even log in, as I’ve apparently managed to forget my login information, and can’t find a confirmation e-mail saved on my computer. Ah, well. So it goes.

iTunes: “Space Shanty” by Leftfield from the album Leftism (1995, 7:15).

[See also: TypePad IDs are TypeKey IDs! | I hate it when I’m stupid | Facebook: MySpace Without the Pain | TypePad User Group | Veronica Moser, Type Key Spammer ]

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