Orkut Worm

Of course, everybody who reads this will have heard about the Orkut Worm by now, but it does bring up the same usual information.

I'm not at all against Web 2.0. I'm not a gloom and doom type. Many of the ideas behind Web 2.0 are very useful and make the web something that it wasn't before. However, it seems that Google is now facing (although on a smaller scale) the same sorts of pain that MySpace had for years.

My personal opinion is that Google should have waited until they could revamp the content management of Orkut to be the same as Blogger before rolling it out. Require XML/XHTML valid syntax coming in, that can be validated against a DTD. Of course, I don't use Orkut, so I'm not positive that the initial worm didn't fit these requirements, there just wasn't sufficient attribute checking (unfortunately, the available news on the worm is really thin right now). But it appears as though this was a simple <script> tag with an external source. /sigh

For developers, let MySpace and Google be an example to you - you'd better be really certain you know what you're doing before you let users dictate look and feel.