Orkut and LinkedIn

I was invited into Orkut and LinkedIn over the past coupla days. So, I tried out both. LinkedIn is much more geared towards professional networking. It's a bit clunky IMO. You have to know a person's email, even if they have already joined to contact them which seems odd. It isn't clear to me what value LinkedIn has really. Sure, you can peruse someone's bio and testimonials from others... I guess that's useful. I don't know that I would find it useful. I suppose if I were looking for employment it might be very useful.

Orkut is a little more oriented towards personal networking it would seem. It's a lot more of a community than LinkedIn which seems little more than some big rolodex in the sky. I certainly found Orkut a lot easier to make connections... just click on a link and away you go!

To be honest, both suffer from usability issues... Orkut's navigation is kinda clunky but still much better than LinkedIn. Maybe it just takes a little getting used to...

I'm not sure how effective the communities will prove... too bad you can't get RSS/Atom feeds for the various communities (or maybe you can, but it was well hidden if so) and use a blog post to contribute to the "discussion". That might be a way of integrating it with tools you're already using.