Random advertising

I recently got sucked into orkut.com, which is yet another social-network thing a la Friendster. Just what the world needed, I know, but it seems like it might have potential to be slightly less useless than Friendster. It's run by Google, although not as an official Google-affiliated project-- basically it's just a personal project by a guy who works at Google (whose name is Orkut). Anyway, I was tempted to send out invitations to all my friends who aren't already there, but I imagine some of them wouldn't like some random website having their email addresses, so instead I'm just posting about it here. Go check it out.

Update: Well, gee, their site is currently down. I suppose I should have predicted that they wouldn't be able to handle the network effect, but I thought that Google-people would know better. Check back some time, I don't think it will go away forever.

Update++: OK, I'm an idiot, it's invite-only anyway-- you can't actually join until someone asks you personally. I guess I'll be sending out some invites whenever they get their act together.

And while I'm plugging things, I thought I'd mention the free_assoc_tag community, which started off like gangbusters but has now kind of dwindled to a low flame (hey, nice mixed metaphor). It's an amusing diversion that could use some fresh blood.

OK, one more: the Volity project aims to make developing online multi-player board games easier, using various open protocols like Jabber, SVG, and ECMAScript. This is something I've been daydreaming about for ages, and I'm glad to see some actual progress by clueful people. If you've got some good ideas to throw in, or some spare time to do some implementation work, I think they'd be appreciated.