Matt points to David, who asks whether it's reasonable for Orkut to own the information you supply to it about yourself. His idea of an identity system where people own their own identity makes me think of FOAF (which I know little about); would a networking service which relied on FOAF files be better?

Such a service could either make use of files hosted remotely (i.e. on servers owned by the individuals creating said files) or generate them for you (and perhaps upload them, much as Blogger will stick the public manifestation of your weblog wherever you like). The problem then becomes: how do you create a nice interface for creating FOAF data? And what applications can be built on top of this data? I guess of particular initial interest would be those applications which don't rely on knowing everything about everyone in FOAFspace simultaneously (i.e. caching huge amounts of data)...

I don't think I get David's other point, about Google owning personal information and using it to target ads. From my reading of his entry, he seems to think this is a bad thing, but I tend towards it being positive: if I'm going to have to see advertising, then I'd much rather see ads which are in some way targeted at me. And it's not like Google can't infer a great deal about their users from search terms etc., I'm sure...

Chris writes about Orkut lacking innovation, which I guess is true: most of these networking services tend towards the same old stuff (though I've only really used Ryze and LinkedIn in any depth). That said, I quite like Orkut so far. Its use of photography makes the communities seem very human, and whilst the signup process was fairly lengthy, much of it was pleasingly optional: I didn't feel that I had to fill out much to join, and consequently felt more inclined to share information about myself.