Where fo.rtuito.us Falls Short
I'm a big fan of social networking, and I believe it's yet to reach it's full potential online. Myspace, the biggest of them all for now, is sort of the bane of the internet in my opinion. Marketing everywhere you turn, god awful profile design that makes your eyeballs bleed, and lots and lots of pointless posts about what band you saw first, 20 questions about nothing, and whatever chain letter that's going around at the time. So naturally, when something like fo.rtuito.us came along, I was excited.
fo.rtuito.us is pretty much the polar opposite of Myspace. It runs on serendipity, see. You have a profile which consists of nothing more than your screen name and a photo, and you're partnered up with a person at random. You see only their screen name, and it's up to the two of you to get to know one another via messaging back and forth. After 5 days, you decide whether or not you want to keep them as a friend, and a new person is served up to you. The process begins again.
I think it's an interesting concept, but after having been a user for over a month now, with 0 friends I see 2 main reasons why it's not so fantastic after all:
1) The 5 day waiting period: I understand the idea behind the 5 day waiting period, but sometimes you don't want to wait. Many times the person never writes back, and you're stuck waiting and waiting until you can try someone bew.
2) Language barriers: As is the way of the internet, fo.rtuito.us enjoys a widely international audience (or so I gather from the number of people I've been connected to who live all over the world). The system should have some sort of translation tool easily accessable to members to help facilitate communication between those who don't share a common primary language.
I think the idea of serendipity in social networks is an interesting one, and I do think I'll try to use the system for another month or so and see what happens. My main beef with it as it is now is something they can definitely fix, and the site is ever-evolving, so it will be interesting to see what sort of changes they make in the following months to come.
