Like many others I had a few emails inviting me to join Orkut this morning. I had first heard mention of it yesterday afternoon when some colleagues found it, and started snickering about it’s mission statement to make people ‘come together’.
It turns out that Orkut is finnish slang for orgasm.
Other than that what to say? It’s YASNS, it looks terrible (pastel colours and wierd faux deco drop-caps? urgh!) but actually has some pretty nice interaction design going on. I think it’s actually the most usable out of the SNS so far, and I suppose this will have to be a trend – new social-network-services aiming lowering barrier to particpation and transfer of networks as you weren’t the first.
It flows pretty intuitively, but with some funny quirks like only giving you access to some rating/karma features when it decides to. It’s affiliated to Google so I guess that’s worth thinking about.
Petafloptimism 
What is YASNS? I keep seeing it around but have no idea what it means.
At the risk of being a whiney beggar, I wonder if I could scrounge an invite off of you. The curiousity is driving me mad.
yet another social network.
I extracted some widgets here
http://www.eleganthack.com/widgetopia/
you may like the design if you like fisher-price aesthetics. not my bag, baby. But i appreciate the completeness of it, especailly after the rag-tag nature of ryze.
the interaction design is really sleek except for the occasional but usually big blunder.
but really, what are they all for? I sitll linked in, the strict school marm of SNs might be the right model. Otherwise it’s all just noise.
What makes it even funnier, “orkut” is plural form of “orkku” in Finnish. So everyone can join and have mutual pleasure…….:)
“Pitäis saada orkut” =
I should get my rocks off
So in a wider context the slang word “orkut” is not only plural for orgasm but is quite often used while describing how horny one actually is.
Way to go google!
I just wonder whether they bothered to use their own search engine to check out if this word actually means anything in other languages???
Maybe they did 🙂
All the best
Another amused Finn