Orkut and Social Networking

I got an invite to orkut and registered there today. first impression: disappointing. I did not like the registration process. Like all other similar sites, there are simply too many questions during registration. One of the challenges in implementing social networking, I feel, is the way you collect information about someone's profile, interests etc. Asking a 100 questions during registration not only tires out the user but the fatigue factor will mean the responses need not be 100% accurate. Building intuitiveness into the process of interest collection by scanning the user's behaviour is a challenge. For example, if Verizon were to implement social networking, it could scan someone's call logs, cross check with superpages and see if he or she has been calling a particular type of numbers frequently, like pizza, chinese restaurants etc. That gives a hint that he likes chinese food for example and may want to network with other such people to share reviews, find new chinese restaurants etc. If Microsoft were to implement the same, scanning e-mail content (ala gmail) could be a way to build intuition. Of course, there are privacy issues that have to be tackled but building in the consent of the user in a non-obstrusive way will help handle that. Interestingly microsoft has been doing a lot of research in social networking. The microsoft research scientist who heads social computing research was at the Microsoft Summit in bombay making a presentation. Their work is very interesting. Check, http://research.microsoft.com/scg

Three links that evaluate social networks, that I think are absolutely excellent are these: (A must read for anyone interested in social networks)
http://www.lifewithalacrity.com/2004/02/my_advice_to_so.html
http://www.lifewithalacrity.com/2004/01/insecurity_at_o.html
http://www.lifewithalacrity.com/2003/12/evaluating_soci.html

I have become very interested in social networking. If anyone has any links/research papers/books that talk about the mathematical analysis of social networks, (complicated math is no problem), please forward. Will be eternally grateful.

Pablo and Rahul, you are in queue :) Its already quite long now. So you will have to wait for some time.