Gollum is my Orkut Friend!
*update: as often before I'm doing the rounds a bit late. Visit Apophenia to see a rant about Orkut and lot of links to other writings on it*

A week or two ago I signed up for another piece of social software, Orkut. com. By now most of the "usual suspects" (lovely suspects, but more or less usual), in my social circle of colleagues who blog or research games or do internet research have signed up. I haven't given it much thought, but I like this software better than Friendster, even if Orkut comes with a somewhat unsettling rating of friends with most friends...it encourages a kind of "levelling behaviour" which has little to do with actual social networking. It is also interesting to note that the people with highest friend ranking quite often seem to be A-list Bloggers (such as Joi Ito or Justin Hall) - their social network already well in place long before joining this network.

Anyway, just like in Friendster, people have now started to invent fictional personalities. So I asked "Gollum" to be my friend a few days ago. Now he has even written me a testimonial! And he is highest in ranking on the friends list. In Friendster, a friend invented a profile called ph.d. dissertation, he/she got some very interesting testimonials as well - and it served well as an outlet of anxieties and jokes about this "object".

SInce the friends in the network is so far people, I socialise with in other ways as well (for instance through blogging or e-mail or even IRL), I think it is much more fun "socialising" around these fictional characters, playing with the fact that you can make up such characters anonymously, and develop a certain kind of shared 'nerdiness' around them. Perhaps it is exactly possibilities like this embedded in the software, that is part of what makes a online social network interesting - at least I can't really imagine this kind of play with characters taking place in similar networks offline. Perhaps sharing an interest in a fictional profile can be a more alternative way to actually meet NEW people in the network.

Hmmh, actually this play with invented profiles is much like the play with characters (the puns and play with known names or personalities) you see in shared online worlds. Not in the way that you use them to "play with identity", but more that you use them to as a way of reaching out to others, using an 'exploit' in the system to do it. Need to think more about all this, but need to go now...

# posted by Lisbeth at: 15:35