Orkut

Some time ago I was invited to join Orkut, which in principle is an idea that I quite like. A closed community where access is gained by invitation only thus, in theory, removing the weirder elements of the net and reducing the amount of spam that people are subjected to. However, this does not seem to work, very quickly there is a market for invitations and the undesirable elements that most netizens would prefer to avoid end up flooding the internal messaging system with spam etc. Google (who own Orkut) have been very good is cracking down on this and have altered the way that the system passes on messages cross posted to several lists. But as is their way the spammers have got around this by now adding their advertisments to the scrapbooks of their victims, thus creating another avenue of annoyance. I don't know what can be done to stop this new phenomena but I really hope that something is done soon as the amount of spam is killing Orkut, just as the spam commenters threatened to kill Livejournal.