Like a hothouse flower, Orkut -- Google's social software experiment -- bloomed and faded, all in a few days. As other have noted. like Ross Mayfield and Marc Canter, there seemed to be an enormous upwelling of interest in Orkut, with millions of page hits, but the socializing aspect of the site was limited to making friends. There was no there, there.

After all, there should be some generation of emergent social capital in our interactions if these services are to add anything to other sorts of communication and community. People have to be doing more than adding friend to their rosters.

My dream is that some uber-FOAF-ish service will come along as a collection of javascript plug-ins we can all add to our blogs, and social networking will emerge where I live in blogspace. I am actively investigating the various services, but there nothing yet compelling enough to get me to move my center-of-gravity out of blogspace into an explicitly social space.