Orkut, Google, Furl,…

Thanks to Keith Pelczarski, whom I met during his time at Motley Fool, just sent me an invitation to Orkut (Thanks Keith! :)) and I have to say that I like what I am seeing. Due to the broader focus than LinkedIn, it’s a bit more time consuming to set it up, but you’ll have lots more information about yourself in there afterwards. I do think that it’s an interesting way to meet new people, and am happily surprised about the feature richness and performance of the service.

But this post goes beyond simply talking about Orkut, which I might do a bit more when I have more experience with it, but rather I am starting to see a real value, especially for Google, in this type of thing, if you just add one tiny variable. Google is starting to have problems with their page rank algorithm, especially because links are so easy to create in the time of blogs and content management systems, and databases and scripts. They will need to tweak their search algorithms to continue to give out the best results possible. This is actually where Furl, which I already raved about in earlier posts, comes in. For those not yet in the know, Furl allows you to easily bookmark, or rathr “furl”, a page. This is then cached by Furl, and you can rate it, put it in categories, write something about it and add keywords. The entire database is then searchable and not only by me but also by anyone who cares to take a look at my furls.

This still does make finding stuff in general not a hell of a lot easier, but you can now add Orkut… and Google. You can then search the web, search your furls, search within your friends furls, or search within your friends friends furls too, get recommendations based on most furled items within your bigger friends network, make page rank take into account furls of any page within the context of the network of the person that furled the page, … You can go on and on with this. The opportunities are endless. The problem is that it likely needs to be free, because it needs to be very big.

So please, Google, go public, buy Furl, integrate Orkut and give me networked-search. Thanks for listening.