Exclusivity ain’t what it used to be

I hate being left out. Conversations, teams, strategy sessions, movie dates, pub crawls … I want it all and I want it now. If I’m not included, I sulk.

So imagine my pique when I read an article over the weekend about Google’s online community, Orkut, and how there are concerns about the proliferation of hate speech among the ”by invitation only” community members.

Whoa … back up a second. Orkut? Community? Invitation? Where is mine? This demanded some further research, so I logged on to my chat room where the usual suspects were gathered:

>Me: Hi everyone.

>Gadgetguy: Hi there. How’ve you been?

>Me: Ok thanks. Bit upset though. Does anyone know about Orkut?

DoGoodUSA shifts from foot to foot

>DoGoodUSA: Um, why?

>Me: I believe it’s an online community that millions have joined … but you can only join if you get invited by another member. I haven’t gotten invited yet, so was wondering if any of you have.

Room goes quiet.

>Me: Hello?

>GarthVader: I think I got an e-mail about it. Not sure.

>Gadgetguy: Me too, I might have gotten an invitation that I accepted

>Me: So why has no one invited me?

Silence

>Jokerguy: I invited Cyberbabe

>Cyberbabe: …and I accepted

Blows kiss to Jokerguy

Jokerguy blushes

>Me: You guys are pathetic. WHERE’S MY INVITATION????

*** You have been kicked by Amazonboy — No shouting in here ***

So not only have I not been invited to join Orkut, I’ve now also been shunned by my online gang because I’m not an Orkut member. This needed fixing, and fast.

I did a quick Google search for ”Orkut invite” and found that I am not alone. Hundreds of thousands of people want invitations to join this online community. I am strangely comforted by this but still feel a bit silly for only hearing about it now, after it’s been live for ages.

So I followed some Google links and trawled the web for a few hours, desperate to find someone to invite me. Not surprisingly, bulletin boards proliferate on which you can post a plea for an invite, which I did.

I then found someone on eBay who was selling invitations — for $0,69 each. After making sure no one was watching (you don’t want to be seen to be buying your way into a community; it’s a bit pathetic, like bribing the local headmaster to get your child accepted into his school), I placed a bid and shortly afterwards received an e-mail to say I was successful.

Not quite so successful (and I won’t bore you with the details) were my attempts to pay for the purchase using PayPal … it’s accepted in 45 countries around the world, but South Africa isn’t among them. Add that to the list of bodies who don’t want me as a member.

Meanwhile, it arrived. My gold-plated bona fide e-mail invitation to join Orkut — a response to one of the pleas I made on a bulletin board. It was unpaid for, but gently solicited. It was late, and I had been online for a while but I couldn’t resist … I clicked on the link, accepted the invitation and there I was, in the middle of Orkut, a signed, sealed, delivered and eager new member.

I took a stroll through the site, my heart sinking with every click. Despite the hype, the excitement, the thrill of getting invited, Orkut is not much more than dozens of similar ventures in the past — a collection of self-defined communities gathered around a bulletin board sharing thoughts, ideas, having debates and posting pictures of their pets, holidays, and strelitzias (depending on the group they happen to be in at the time).

Think the old newsgroups, then eGroups, Yahoo Groups and all the other imitators. Orkut is different in that you compile lists of ”friends” from across the community, but apart from that, it is much the same. These ventures start off strongly, then became not much more than hiding holes for spam and scam artists of every type.

They eventually get buried under a tonne of garbage and all the members evacuate until the sites begin to resemble a Western ghost town — complete with swinging bar doors, tumbleweed drifting down the main road and a lady of ill repute sitting on her porch, whisky glass in hand, fag dangling from between her lips. Not much happening in these deserted parts, lonely in the saddle since the horse died and all that.

And my money is on the fact that Orkut will head the same way. The ”by invitation only” thing is all well and good, but as soon as those invitations can be bought on eBay or solicited on a bulletin board by placing a single plea, then the ”club” has lost its exclusivity and the only thing that makes it different from all that has come before.

Content-wise, there’s nothing fresh on Orkut. Google, in its usual innovative way, tried to shake up the model by making entry exclusive, but it should have first read Malcolm Gladwell’s great book The Tipping Point.

Had it done so, it would have learned that it is indeed a small world. And if you encourage 10 people to do something, and each of them encourages 10 others, and so on, exponentially it won’t be long before the whole world is doing it. It’s a great concept if you’re selling shoes, search engines or chocolate bars; not so great if you’re trying to keep something special.

And so I wouldn’t worry about the hate speech if I were Google. It won’t be long before no one bothers to log in, and the scum who wrote it will be talking to themselves anyway. And they deserve everything they hear.

Tony Lankester spends his spare time as a writer and commentator on any subject that he thinks he can get away with. A former radio presenter, he’s particularly into technology, gadgets, the internet, the media, and advertising. But that doesn’t stop him posing as an expert on a range of subjects that covers food, single malt whisky, reality TV and travel. During the remaining hours, he has a respectable full-time job at a large financial services company.