Eric raps it out succinctly (thank god I don't have to go and do all the screen dumps!) I spent hours last night updating my friends. Unfortunately there's no batch processing - so it's 600+ clicks and page updates (minimum) for me!

Orkut breaks out of the "Are you my friend YES OR NO" problem. Kinda.

As drawn to my attention on IRC, Orkut has redefined it's friendships to include a relationship scale.

Now, what they got right was introducing "acquaintances", "haven't heard of", and something better than just "friend". Arguments can be made that they should have put in some negative relationships as well, but that's a problem for another day.

Here's what they didn't get right:

They made the data only visible to the person making the relationship. Argh! Once again, the people at Orkut data-stripmining our brains, under the guise of a helpful feature.

It appears to just be an easy way to sub-sort-and-show friends lists.

Thinking about the way Orkut has handled friends..er, relationships up to this point, it follows what they've done so far. All the data is kept internal, and all you know is that you are linked to someone else, and if you're a fan or not.

Exposing the relationship type ("acquaintance, friend, etc") to the outside world isn't a no-brainer, because there would be some (potentially heavy) social issues to deal with.

For one, you'd be introducing a new angle of friction into the relationship-making process. ("Are you my [please fill in the blank] YES OR NO?"). Combine this with a wrong UI/invite layout, and you could have a very teeth gritting experience.

Also, you'd run into two sides of another potentially socially annoying/embarrassing issue, namely different people will interpret "friend/goodfriend/bestfriend" differently, and different sides of the relationship will have different opinions of the value. So now I say A is my friend, and A thinks I'm a good friend. I'm naturally someone reserved when it comes to making statements, and so while A and I may feel at the same level, my external choice

So it's not an easy call, but I still think Orkut made the wrong one. I believe that there are ways that you can involve the other party in a relationship typing process without too much pain, and that exposing (or perhaps giving the option to expose) relationship types to the outside world would be healthy and helpful for some people.

For example, I'd like people to know that Don Benne is someone I state to be a good friend, and not just a random stranger that I heard of. And, if you could involve him in the typing process, then you could indicate as much, saying that he states back that he agrees with the relationship type.

Another way of looking at this, (and why I suspect Orkut will eventually give an option to make this info public) is that making relationship types public could be very similar to LinkedIn, in that they start to make "professional associations" somewhat trustworthy, Orkut eventually acting as a social connections certifier.

A little birdie told me a few days ago that a new Relationship schema/ontology (what are we calling them these days kids?) is getting ready to go. I suspect it will be expedited. Please?

P.S. to the Orkut kids, we had this in PeopleAggregator six months ago. (We may not have had much, including working code, but we had this.)