June 22, 2004
MarkBernstein.org
 

Orkut is Over

Well, that was fun for about 10 minutes. All my orkut mail now comes from the friends of a "friend" from Iran, I'm buried in their spam.

So, it seems, is everyone else: the orkut servers are timing out left and right.

Aside from the petty annoyance, I think this goes to the heart of Spolsky's argument about Web-based applications. We could, in principle, but up with the UI baggage that server-side computer imposes. But trying to manage spam mail when every "skip this!" requires a round-trip and refresh is intolerable. And it's not something you can easily fix -- it seems to me the problem is baked into the architecture.