Clay Shirky says that Orkut and Friendster don’t seem to understand that friendship isnt a transaction.
The attempt to fit the roundish-but-with-weird-protuberances peg of human congress into the square hole of transactional connections and bi-directional links is the problem. Orkuts changes to the friend interface do nothing to address the underlying badness of fit between friendship as mutual feeling over time and their desire to make it transaction because transactions are easier to code.
