Some Orkut fuelled thoughts...
I wonder how long it will be before you can hook up your regular email app's address book with your social network. In one sense, socnets like Orkut are just highly functional and public address books. I really think that both these trains, (e-mail & social networks) are going to crash into each other at some point in the future. Maybe that's when SPAM dies out.
A workable commercial Socnet might be interesting. Where you would rank trading service and quality rather than individual attributes like coolness.
Tools like Orkut slam home just how white & male this district of Web really is.
There should be a way of calculating your soc-juice that represents the number of people in your network weighted by the size of their networks. Like, you could have one hundred friends each with a friend, e.g. you - which would describe a rather scary cult type deal where you would need to have locked up all of your followers/friends in prison cells and forbade them contact with anyone but you (note: neat idea for a movie script), or you could have 20 friends with 100 friends each. In other words, how potent are your connections. I'm sure this has already been discussed in detail on other networks, but bear with my lag. At least I'm getting there, if a little late.
As a rich source of demographic and highly structured data, I wonder how long it will be before they need to start locking up aspects of it to prevent spam and other forms of abuse.
Most of my network lives 3,000 miles or more away from me. This either suggests that the more of the most interesting people live across the Atlantic or I have a problem with intimacy. Ergo I'm unlikely to meet Web friends if they're 3,000 miles away. Although having said that, with the exception of Euan Semple who lives about an hour away from me, all of the Web people I've met do live 3,000+ miles away from me.
There's a distinct firebreak between my Web friends and my RL friends. I'm guessing that's the same for most people on Orkut, which limits its scope beyond its ability to be a container for entire social networks and puts it, and its predecessors, more in the category of social cloud, a definition I like better because it implies multiple social clouds in an individual's entire social universe.
Halley, resistance is futile. We have a seat reserved for you. Succumb.