The Kobayashi Maru test is not meant to be passed. Instead, it's a test to see how a prospective captain will react under such a "no-win scenario". Star Trek fans often use the name of this test to describe "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situations. Geeks of an earlier generation might have used the term "Catch-22", a reference to the Joseph Heller novel from which it was derived.
I suspect future geeks might use the term "Orkut", or perhaps an adjective like "orkward".
Although Orkut is well-known among people who tend to develop Web software or have weblogs, my guess is that most people have never heard of it. Orkut is one of the newer incarnations of "social software", for which the simplest definition is "software that connects people together". Orkut is essentially a giant database of people, the people they know, and the interconnections between those people. You can view your list of friends, choose a friend and see his or her list of friends, then choose one of those "friends-in-law" and see that person's list of friends, and so on.
Every person's listing on Orkut has a profile, which can include a photo, and different sorts of sets of information:
- Social: "Me in a nutshell" factoids such as birthday, sexual orientation, ethnicity, politics, type of humour and so on.
- Professional: Education, current working situation, and the like.
- Personal: Information for prospective dates -- in other words, the really juicy stuff. One item lists your best feature, which you must choose from a list. Mine is "butt".
You don't have to answer any questions you'd rather not, and you have control over what information your friends, friends of friends and strangers see. For instance, you can set your profile so that friends -- that is, people listed in Orkut as your friends -- can see your home address and phone number, while others can't.
Orkut has other features, the most notable one being their discussion groups, but at its core is its database of people and the way they are interconnected.
Orkut (and similar social software projects such as Friendster)
don't let you simply claim that so-and-so is your friend. When you tell
Orkut that so-and-so is your friend, Orkut sends a message to so-and-so
saying that you claim to be their friend, and asks if this is so. It
looks something like this:
From a purely mechanistic point of view -- the sort of perspective
that makes complete sense to database programmers, this makes perfect
sense: Person A claims to be a friend of Person B, so we go to B and
ask if this is so, after which we mark B as A's friend. As far as the
mechanics go, this is a very simple thing to set up; any
halfway-competent computer science student taking their first database
course should be able to build a "Who is friends with whom"
database.
From a humanistic point of view, it's a mess.
Since Orkut displays your friends in a nice tiled three-column
mosaic -- not unlike baseball cards, or to be less charitable, an
entemologist's collection of insects, clearly labelled and neatly
pinned onto felt -- there is a natural tendency for Orkut users to fill
this list with as many people as they can.
Orkut also displays the number of friends each person has, just to ensure that everyone has that "keeping up with the Joneses" feeling. As if this weren't enough, Orkut also has a stats page which keeps track of the best:
- "Connectors": the people with the fewest degrees of separation between them and any given person in Orkut, on average (Joi Ito is currently Orkut's best connector, being 3.25 degrees of separation from any given person on Orkut)
- "Celebrities": the people whose profiles have been viewed the most (Marc Canter leads this race, as his profile has been viewed nearly 15000 times)
- "Stars": the people who have the most fans (on orkut, you can say that you're a fan of someone. Joi has the most fans, with a count of 251.)
By very prominently showing everyone how many friends every other
person has, Orkut becomes a competition to see who can get the most
friends in their list.
Remember that recent issue of The Onion,
in which they wrote an article about a car that ran on anger? Maybe
emotion-powered physical devices may not be possible, but that's not
the case with software. Orkut is powered by envy.
In the competition to collect as many friends as possible, the definition of "friend" gets stretched. As far as the database is
concerned, your spouse of thirty years, whom you've known since
childhood and who donated live-saving bone marrow to you has exactly
the same kind of relationship with you as the guy with whom you once
instant-messaged.
Naturally, the best tactic is to try and get listed as a popular person's friend, no matter how tenuous your connection to that person is. My (actual, real-life, we've gone to Disneyland together) friend Cory Doctorow, one of the "must-know" people in the worlds of both the web and science fiction writing, was once on Friendster but left shortly after joining. He summarized his problem with social software in a request to people who make social software:
I have a special request to the toolmakers of
2004: stop making tools that magnify and multilply awkward social
situations ("A total stranger asserts that he is your friend: click
here to tell a reassuring lie; click here to break his heart!")
To be continued...
Office phone:
Google Talk:
Alan
www.genx40.com
if i have met you face-to-face and 1) don't respect you, 2) don't like you or 3) we have some "history" and you've done me wrong, i just ignore the "friend" request.
if i've never met you face-to-face and/or i've not interacted with you to some sufficient degree to ascertain some respectable level of respect for you, i also don't acknowledge your unsolicited friend request.
it seems that These Social Networking Things are shaping up to be All About quantity over quality. as such, i could have a Much Higher "friend status" on orkut, but, for me, life is all about The Quality of Individuals, not The Quantity.
Geoff Goodfellow
http://blogging.cz
ICQ kinda made some features like that, where you could be displayed as online, except that some people would still think you were offline or just busy. Which I used.
I just get annoyed by the whole thing. I've noticed that, as time has gone on, I've gotten progressively more antisocial online.
But then after looking at their profiles, realized that they were fellow photobloggers or such, any sent the request becuase they read my site on a regular basis.
But there definitely is a difference in my orkut friends listings.
a) People I have Met
b) People that I have met and are friends with
c) People that I know online and have not met.
d) People that I have never met, but know online and consider really good friends.
When orkut first started, I added Evan Williams as a friend (as I met him briefly at SXSW last year) obviously I didn't make much of an impression on him, as I didn't make the cut on his list.
I suppose it would be nice to give each friends a rating from 1 to 10. Although at the same time, this would be time consuming and could cause more problems when you realize that your friendship with someone else doesn't measure in the same way.