Orkut continues to undermine Google’s Data Liberation Front, whose singular goal is to “make it easier for users to move their data in and out of Google products”. Earlier this month the Orkut friend exporter, which makes it easy to export your friends’ contact information to a standard CSV file, was mysteriously broken due to a bug. The timing of the bug was more than a little suspect — Orkut has been hemorrhaging users lately in India and Brazil as people flock to Facebook, which takes advantage of Orkut’s friend export tool to help users make the switch. Now Julio Vasconcellos over at Armchairfounder has noticed how Orkut managed to fix their bug while still making it harder for members to switch to Facebook: the tool works, but it no longer includes your friends’ Email addresses.
In other words, now when you export your list of friends from Orkut, all you’ll get is a list of their names, location, birthday, gender, and links to the Orkut profiles. Which means it’s basically useless. Facebook can’t use the data to invite your friends, and you can’t use the data to actually contact and share with your friends, which is the whole point of a social graph.
We reached out to Google about the issue, and a Google spokesperson gave us this statement:
“Mass exportation of email is not standard on most social networks — when a user friends someone they don’t then expect that person to be easily able to send that contact information to a third party along with hundreds of other addresses with just one click. In order to protect user privacy, we now exclude email addresses from the CSV export file. Of course users can still export their friend lists in the CSV file. In addition, Google Contacts syncs with Orkut, so users can export their Orkut friends’ email addresses from Google Contacts. We support web standards such as OAuth and are working on ways to help users share their data more securely between social networks. We believe strongly that users own their data, and we’re committed to finding ways to make it easier for users to export data.”
Google is right in that this isn’t a standard feature on most social networks, but most social networks aren’t busy touting things like the Data Liberation Front and reaping all the positive press associated with it. And if this is really a privacy issue, it doesn’t make sense that Google would let you export Email data through Google Contacts but not Orkut itself. Spammers looking to figure out how to harvest Email addresses will doubtless figure out the process. Of course, Orkut users looking to make the jump to Facebook probably won’t.
Vasconcellos also points out that Orkut’s tool is unncessarily hard to use, and he’s absolutely right. When I went to test out the friend exporter, I was fairly certain that it simply wasn’t working at all. That’s because every time you click on the ‘Export Contacts’ button the site kicks you back out to your homepage, and only shows the “take your contacts with you” section below the fold. It took me way too long to figure this out (I even tested the feature out in two different browsers). And I doubt most people will put in that much effort.
It’s understandable why Orkut would want to handicap the feature and make it hard to use, but Google can’t have it both ways: it’s either open, or it isn’t.
Orwhat?
orkut, its kind of like what google wave will become, or google talk, or google voice, or picasa, or dodgeball, or jaiku.
Google is evil there is no OrWhat.
It is business as usual. Don’t ever believe “Don’t do evil”
lol, they’re the only social network with a friend exporter that uses an open standard as far as I’ve noticed.
If they never created the feature, you wouldn’t be saying this.
That’s the point. Don’t be evil as long as it not hit your bottom line. Or just say Don’t be evil as long as they are not in the no 1 position
dont have to be nice, but dont be evil
dont be evil
except when it increases our bottom line and profits
where’s fb’s friend exporter?
also, google was never not evil. anyone with half a brain and an hour of education should see that. they are super useful though, which means I don’t mind them knowing everything about me.
To that I respond, where’s FB’s “Data Liberation Front” campaign? This isn’t an issue over the feature itself, it’s about the hypocrisy evident in their decision making.
I’m sure this is Google’s “payback” for Facebook not letting Google scrape email addresses for Friend Connect.
I feel Google is right in saying exporting the email address of friends is no way correct. That data, even though it is part of your profile, is not something you store by yourself.
I agree it is too painful to export the data out of orkut. But how can you blaim Google. India and Brazil users are all they have now.
still it gotta make faster….i’m really sick og this!!
Sushi. Sake. Coconut Ice Cream.
I guess this was to be expected. Google just could not sit back and watch their (most?) users in India walk away to FB could they?
Interestingly though, some of my friends were discussing just yesterday about how the Live Feed on FB sucks and that they would prefer to move back to Orkut. Wonder if Orkut still has a chance of making a comeback at least here in India. Would be an interesting battle.
Being able to export email addresses, in my opinion, is a privacy concern and I agree that that information should not be exported in any way. If I friend someone on a social network, I expect that they either 1) have my email address or 2) don’t. If they don’t have my email address (perhaps a casual online friend only), then they shouldn’t have access to it.
Can you export a friend list with email addresses from Facebook, MySpace or even Twitter? I don’t think you can, why is Google any more evil?
I think Google/Orkut isn’t being honest. Orkut has offered this feature for a long time now. Surely the privacy issue came up at some point previously, and it would have been trivial to change. So why now?
I don’t think this makes Google evil. I think it’s a move that puts them on the same level as everyone else, which is fine, but then they shouldn’t play up their ‘openness’ card so much.
There is a pattern of Google constantly doing this. They encourage openness when its convenient to THEM and stay silent when openness concerns their own properties. They are the new Microsoft except worse. Google will come to you with cookies and ice cream and pretend to be friends. Give them your data, watch them use you, then they’ll through you to the curve(like Navteq, teleatlus, soon twitter, newspapers, the list goes on.). So in that sense they are more evil.
As an Orkut user, I do have to say that I don’t like all the spam I’ve been receiving from Facebook. I don’t like my email beaing “leaked” in this sort of automated way.
That said, however, this whole social networking debacle is ridiculous. Can’t they just make an open social graph, which works across Orkut, Facebook, Twitter, and what-have-you?
The question is, why would you “friend” someone you wouldn’t trust with your e-mail address?
“make it easier for users to move their data in and out of Google products”
Is the personal information of all of your friends really considered “your data”, or just data that you have access to?
do no sharing
or was that
do no evil
I’ve been on Orkut a while and I’d guess this is more, as I said before, related to keeping things above board with respect to scripting vs. actual -user- interaction.
My guess is they will roll out export native to an open approach when they are ready.
Hmm, and yet only 12 days ago….
http://www.live...-in-ba.html?h=B
Vihari Komaragiri, product manager, Orkut, Google India said that Google’s chief executive Eric Schmidt does not believe in locking its users in. “He stressed that we did not want people to use our products solely because they cannot get their data out to switch to a competing service,” said Komaragiri. “We encourage other companies to follow suit instead of trying to lock users into their products by holding user data hostage.”
interesting article however imho both views can be understood. yours just as googles.
isn’t data liberation front focused on “your” data and so far they did quite a nice job compared to other companies. if your data includes the data of others it becomes much more controversial.
“And if this is really a privacy issue, it doesn’t make sense that Google would let you export Email data through Google Contacts but not Orkut itself”
It does make a little sense considering that most email clients support contact export to csv while most social networks do not.
Orkut is a giant cash cow for Google in India. As an advertiser on Orkut I can tell you on thing for sure, the quality of traffic is dismissal. CTRs are lower than most social networks such as Facebook and even though you do end up with leads, they are useless. The conversion rate from an Orkut lead is equivalent to a cold call! Orkut is dead and Google should accept it.
It’s really sad that Google didn’t put any effort into promoting and developing Orkut when it first came out. I discovered it just after the great Friendster exodus and it could easily have been the next Facebook.
Most of the movement from Orkut to Facebook has been natural even without using the export feature. All social networking in India is mostly a college phenomenon which then grows out as the users take jobs. These days that flow has been taken over by facebook which is why Orkut is stagnating.
Unless it does something unique for the Indian market, it will loose this game in the long run. The export feature enabling/disabling are poor defensive steps and show a lack of long term vision in the first place. The way to win this is to roll out new and interesting features. Orkut just hasn’t been able to do that effectively for some time now.
If I remember correctly your contacts email adresses are already in gmail if you connect your orkut account with it, from there it’s easy to import those friends into facebook.
I actually found an old orkut friend about a month ago that way.
The best time is now going on(in social network). it name is facebook.
I Can”t Access Orkut. My Orkut is blocked So no Comment form my side.
Chill & Rock
(.) (.)
“Do no evil” is just marketing.
Too many chiefs, not enough Indians.
Too many cooks in the kitchen.
Who cares? Orkut used to be plagued by brazilians it’s nice they keep out from Facebook.
This name is very brandbucketesc
i asked you friend ship
I LOVE YOU
Wasn’t it Ben Franklin who said, “Orkut is the social networking site with the worst policies regarding exporting contact information, except or all of the others.”?
Seriously, I find it very frustrating that I can’t export all of my Facebook contacts into my Gmail contacts. It would be extremely useful to me.
I don’t actually use Orkut, but I sure wish Facebook had the same policies.
As to the privacy issues: I don’t really have an answer. There are so many things which are both incredibly useful and incredibly invasive. My favorite is a tool that Google Picasa offers to its users. I don’t even use Picasa, but this affects everyone who every gets their picture taken. If anyone takes a picture of you and puts it up on Picasa and then tags it with your name, Picasa will look through all of that person’s pictures and recognize all of the pictures of you. Theoretically, Google could tag all of the pictures on the entire internet with people names and make it searchable. At the moment, when a friend posts a picture on Facebook of you funneling a beer while naked, at least you can remove the tag so that it is hard for other people to find it. Still, tagging friends when you have hundreds of pictures to go through is a highly tedious job.
http://picasa.g...y?answer=156272
I don’t really think privacy is a legitimate excuse for Facebook blocking the exporting of contact data since people should be only friending people who they are friends with. The problem that could come up is when someone loses their account to a compromised password and a spammer gets a hold of it. But since programs already exist which successfully scrape contact data (including reading those little pictures of your email address) from Facebook, (Facebook has been known to shut down the accounts of people who use them based on Terms Of Service violations.) any hacker worth her salt could easily get extract all the data from any account to which she has gained access.