hairylunch

Bleh, I should be asleep so I can get up early and be productive and pack (I move on Saturday and I haven't done much packing or cleaning). Instead, I played some Diablo, and played with Orkut for a bit. For those who don't know Orkut is similar to Friendster. It was developed by Google engineer Orkut Buyukkokten. It seems to scale better than Friendster, as it doesn't take 90 seconds per page load (or maybe just not that many people are in it). The network is a little bit like LiveJournal use to be as you have to be invited to join it. My understanding is that 12,000 initial invitations were sent out, to a mainly techie crowd. I could be wrong about the mainly techie part.

So questions I have:

1. How rapidly did Orkut move from the west coast to other parts of the world? (It stills seems pretty Silicon Valley/tech focused)


2. How rapidly did it move from tech to non-tech?


3. What's the male-female ratio? How do the networks of males compare to those of females?


4. Do married people tend to network to other married people? Do singles?


5. How have cliques played out?

The last one is inspired by my brother. I wonder if the network is truly web like or if it's more hub-spoke like? I would think it's more like the latter, similar to the internet as a whole. In other words, are lots of people connecting in a multitude of ways, or are there some people who are very important, connecting lots of people and acting as hubs? I'd assume the latter, as a quick use of the "network" feature leads to people with 300+ friends. Of course, this is partly due to the fact that the "network" feature shows all of one person's friends, arranged so that the person with the most friends is in the middle.

It also has communities, and the largest I've found so far is the LiveJournal one, with 756 members at the moment. I wonder what school has the largest? Stanford is up at 658, and MIT is at 353. My alma matter is at a whopping 10.