I lost track of the number of people who asked me at DebConf if I was on Orkut. So, being the keen reader of subtleties that I am, I figured it was time to check it out.

I’m still finding my way around, but I’m also having much more fun than I was expecting to. I probably spent three hours clicking around that first clip, finding the people I’ve gotten to know over the past six months in my travels but always got too busy to add to my address book when I got home. I still have a pile of business cards and scraps of paper with contact information on them sitting on my desk at Progeny. And there’s far more information about the people I’ve met on Orkut just sitting there waiting for me than I’d ever be able to collect in my own address book, even with several assistants to help me.

Being a businessman, one of my first thoughts was: What’s in this for Google? They didn’t charge me a cent for joining, and I’m not seeing ads anywhere.

Then it hit me. This is an identity management play.

What if Orkut evolves into the Internet’s address book, much as Google has evolved into the Internet’s memory? What if the next step is a set of Orkut extensions to the Google APIs that allows me to transparently tie into the Internet address book from my mailer and eventually to authenticate myself once for the entire web or store my preferences for any website or any number of other “holy grail” type things..

In short, Orkut is Passport done bottom up, which is to say, done right. All the folks diligently entering their information and linking to each other inside this closed system (including, now, me) are unwitting accomplices to Google’s plan. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it does remain to be seen what Google will do with its power in the long run.

Watch out, Microsoft. These guys are very, very good.